A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
> 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
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.
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.
For what its worth I upvoted your first comment because i agree, and downvoted your second for complaining about votes
I see it also says don’t comment on votes, which I hadn’t noticed before. I would go back and delete that comment but then your reply would make no sense, so oh well.
Thank you for posting your explanation and helping set me straight on HN etiquette, I appreciate it!
I certainly don’t mean to say people should shed their ideas, or that we should be starlings that flock together.
But I do think it’s important to see humanity as one species, one people, who have most things in common and thrive by working together constructively.
That’s why I feel it’s important to seek to understand the people who see the world differently than you, rather than just exist in blind opposition to them.
When we let our ideology define who we are it becomes a religion, and world history has plenty of examples of people taking religious ideology as a reason to blindly oppose and eventually wage literal war on “the other.”
Meanwhile, healthy mutual tolerance comes from seeking to understand and then arranging life in such a way that each person can have their own ideas and worldview without needing to quash the others.
To me that feels like just a description of liberal philosophy, so it’s surprising I most often have this conversation with friends leaning far left who are so angry they are thinking more in terms of how to wage a war than how to find a workable mutual tolerance.
Better for the slaves to sit down and write complex analyses on what is wrong about slavery and bicker amongst themselves about the details (I joke)!
But anyways, obviously most 'leftists' wouldn't equate slavery with their own situation, and I'd argue most of them do want to go as far as possible through understanding and conversation. But to some degree I'd say that's the basic point of view.
This is incorrect. However, you may find this portion of the guidelines for comments enlightening:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Reasoning from this perspective, wouldn’t this require a society that is more collectively and communally-oriented that one based around extreme competition with each other as the means of survival?
I don’t see how you resolve this antagonism in a society like the US, where failing to ruthlessly compete against others can mean losing healthcare for your family and children, slipping into homelessness, etc. Obviously, other countries mitigate this more with robust safety nets, but you seem to be mistaking a symptom for a cause.
> It would be an offense to say, well, it’s just politics... to understand depression through political frames does not mean that the problem of depression can be immediately solved by political means. There is a horror to depression that cannot and must not be translated too quickly into the sphere of politics, regardless of our critical and revolutionary aspirations.
The article is suggesting we should eschew the hyper-individualization of our understanding, diagnosis, and response to depression—and do so by contextualizing it within the political economy in which it lives. It’s a call specifically to not reduce it to chemicals, subjects, and personal responsibilities—and, instead, recognize the impacts of capital, structures, and collective responsibilities which capitalism (and the defensive and capital-protecting ideology and politics it gives rise to) wishes us to ignore. This is the capitalist “realism” the author states runs in tandem with depressive realism—that there are no alternatives, that there really is nothing to be done about the current state of affairs.
The article is calling attention to the possibility—no, the need—to reject this false narrative. There are alternatives, but, the article suggests we instead find comfort in increasingly diagnosing and pathologizing what could be normal effects of capitalism on those who live under it. Instead of recognizing the ways in which our social, political, and economic structures impact subjects, we instead say it’s the subjects who have a chemical imbalance or defect:
> In this way, the diagnosis provides momentary meaning to meaningless misery. The suffering gets a name and a cause: a lack of serotonin. But this cause has causes which in the diagnostic system — and in the capitalist world as a whole — remain undiagnosed and untold.
Whether or not you agree with such a possibility, the very question is, I think, provocative and worth considering and discussing.
What I find “crudely reductionist,” in the article is the very idea of “capitalist realism,” and the idea that some notion called “capitalism,” can be the cause of all depression.
Are we to think that depression did not exist in the Soviet Union? Or perhaps in the mercantilist kingdoms of the colonial era? Or perhaps not in the Roman Empire? Or what about ancient China or India?
There’s some irony in saying “capitalist realism tries to fool us that this is all there could ever be,” when the article itself is declaring that capitalism (or any -ism) can only be some kind of evil force which naturally causes depression.
It doesn’t read to me like a thoughtful scientific article, but like a religious text decrying another religion.
I find the real world is not nearly so black and white. Certainly the “capitalism” as practiced in the United States is far different than that practiced in Norway, as well as the statist system in practice in Cuba and currently falling apart in Venezuela.
It’s hard for me to see this author as doing anything other than taking a victim mentality and trying to prescribe it for everyone else, laying Universal blanket blame on the authors preferred heresy.
> What I find “crudely reductionist,” in the article is the very idea of “capitalist realism,” and the idea that some notion called “capitalism,” can be the cause of all depression.
No, that’s your same reductionist interpretation of the article’s complex claims. You’re just re-stating your initial reaction to the article, while saying it’s what the article is arguing.
The article does not argue or suggest that capitalism “can be the cause of all depression”. Instead, it argues that, because capitalism is the political economy within which our current notion of depression is framed, the act of individualizing depression, while ignoring extrinsic factors as potentially causal and/or contributory, is something we should reconsider.
> Are we to think that depression did not exist in the Soviet Union? Or perhaps in the mercantilist kingdoms of the colonial era? Or perhaps not in the Roman Empire? Or what about ancient China or India?
This is a rather disingenuous bit of whataboutism. The article made no such claims. Given the article’s actual claims, I’d wager the author would suggest we should be looking to the social, political, and economic structures of those specific societies and systems to better understand and contextualize the depression that undoubtedly did exist.
Again, you’re being extremely reductionist here—you’re attempting to turn the article’s grappling with a complex problem, and attempts to contextualize it within the social, political, and economic structures in which it arises into some form of Universal Theory of Capitalist Depression. That’s your argument, not the article’s.
There’s some irony in saying “capitalist realism tries to fool us that this is all there could ever be,” when the article itself is declaring that capitalism (or any -ism) can only be some kind of evil force which naturally causes depression.
The article doesn’t quite declare that. That seems to be your own reaction to the article placing capitalism and the material conditions under which it subjects people (and the impact that may have on mental health) under its microscope. However, this irony you seem to see is quite unclear to the point of not seeming ironic at all.
> Certainly the “capitalism” as practiced in the United States is far different than that practiced in Norway, as well as the statist system in practice in Cuba and currently falling apart in Venezuela.
The author points this out directly on multiple occasions. The author is primarily concerned with Danish society, but alluded to the great differences in the US and elsewhere, and wonders aloud about what impact the different material conditions in which people live might have on their mental health individually and collectively.
> It’s hard for me to see this author as doing anything other than taking a victim mentality and trying to prescribe it for everyone else, laying Universal blanket blame on the authors preferred heresy.
That seems to be your interpretation, and clearly explains why you’re so completely missing the article’s point. The article is directly arguing against the hyper-individualistic pathology of depression as it exists in current discourse. The article is suggesting that what we call depression could very well be a normal reaction to the material conditions within capitalist political economy. If it is, the article thinks, that’s a game-changer.
It really sounds like you’re offended by taking a critical look at capitalism, as if you believe capitalism (or any other kind of ism) does not engender social, political, and economic structures that both serve and reinforce it—or that humans might not have universally positive reactions to such structures and conditions. From crippling, life-long reliance on debt, extreme competition, increasing inequality, and social expectations to be always happy, coupled with always laying the blame for failing to navigate such structural pressures directly on individuals, the author suggests perhaps we should be careful about absolving the structures themselves of any responsibility for their impact on people.
Again, it’s fine to disagree with the author’s conclusions. But I think you should be engaging with the strongest version of the article’s arguments, not reducing them to overly simplistic forms that make it feel easier to dismiss without consideration.
Try https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewo....
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.
>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-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
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=depr...
It'd seem much more inline with the spirit of the HN guidelines if others could respond and critique to your messages instead of downvoting (which feels like it may be more of an attempt to suppress a message).
I want to highlight an important sentence:
> To receive a diagnosis of depression, these symptoms must cause the individual clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. The symptoms must also not be a result of substance abuse or another medical condition.
https://qz.com/1162154/30-years-after-prozac-arrived-we-stil...
What GP gets right, though, is that depression != sadness. It is normal (and often healthy) to feel sadness after experiencing loss or other hardships. It is not healthy to feel hopeless and devoid of energy for months on end... that's what depression is.
I mean, when you get hit by a car and you get shock from blood loss, you die of shock from blood loss but you also die from the car. You could solve the problem with better EMT's and blood transfusions and stuff but you could also solve the problem by having better public transit and not having cars everywhere, you know?
It draws from the preferred means of treatment for suicide survivors: controlled boredom under observation by mental health professionals in a hospital until emotional equilibrium is reestablished from the lack of external stimulus.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/20100...