The trigger for a boy retreating to his bedroom might be comparatively slight - poor grades or a broken heart, for example - but the withdrawal itself can becom

The trigger for a boy retreating to his bedroom might be comparatively slight - poor grades or a broken heart, for example - but the withdrawal itself can become a source of trauma. And powerful social forces can conspire to keep him there. My observation is that mental illness often has a hurricane-like property wherein the storm is bearable but the social fallout (looting, arson, opportunistic crime) afterward is far more destructive. The disease itself is unpleasant but bearable. People are not. In a high-stress society like corporate life in the U.S. or Japan, everyone will have deviances from perfect mental function. One would wish for them to have negative autocorrelation (self-correction). Instead, those deviations are often pushed further by external forces. Sometimes it's intentional (ambitious rivals want to thin out competition) but normally it's just an artifact of the stupid stigmas around these diseases. ("He's depressed, not a team player.") People really don't understand these problems. They think a "panic attack" is that time they hit a heart rate of 120 because they drank too much caffeine before a deadline. No, that's not panic (that's mild anxiety). Panic attacks throw about 50 different symptoms (you have to have a few before you see them all) of which any one of them would feel like an acute, life-threatening crisis to a sane person. Almost everyone who has a true panic attack will end up in the ER, the first time. You have to cycle through all of the bizarre symptoms a few times before you realize that the attacks aren't dangerous. Once you've learned this, they're just annoying ("shit, there goes the next 10 minutes") but the first few attacks are devastating because they feel real. I also think that the corporate world creates laziness and depression, not in the blase Dilbert sense, but because people who are conditioned to associate work with subordination turn either into disengaged clock-punchers (steal from the system, because it will steal from you) or useless, delegating executives. We think our society values work, but given the increasing association between work and subordination, isn't that indicative of the opposite? Society effectively programs people to lose motivation and shut down, then stigmatizes people who do so-- whether because of conditioning or an unrelated biological problem-- even if it's only for a week or two. I think the "test" of the dues-paying grunt work is whether a person can keep going in spite of recurring negative signals (subordination, artificially delayed advancement, repetitive busy-work without the leeway to automate it or render it unnecessary) but the truth is that that's a stupid fucking test.