I’ve known since I was a kid that I’m depressed. I even have infant photos of me, where I look like I just hate life. Other baby photos the baby is smiling, and interested in everything. Whereas I look like even though I’m too young to even have thoughts, I’m still giving off body language of “leave me alone”.
But when I started asking everyone I knew if they too were depressed, I haven’t gotten one single person to say that they’re happy. Everyone has said they’re depressed. So now I wonder if it’s a regional thing, or if everyone everywhere is depressed.
When I was six and in first grade, the teachers directed me to the school psychologist. But it was the early 1970s and people had just seen The Exorcist and believed it was based on a true story, so when it came to me, I was just a bit odd.
It would turn into a diagnosis Major Depression in my early twenties, severe enough to get disability benefits. It would become Anaclitic Depression in my late twenties. Around fifty, I was the subject of my psychotherapist’s PHD thesis and got an ASD diagnosis out of it. I’m now enby, though through most of my life I was [M] because that’s what it said on my state ID. Whatever.
When I was in a partial hospital program, the fine doctors who answered questions explained some models regarding sanity, that almost everyone has to contend at very least with neuroses, which are characterized by internal conflicts. Those are like:
This was in the nineties, in which the US was undergoing an epidemic of mental illness, featuring a lot of major depression. There are reservations in the academic sector as to opine why – I expect – for the same reason climatologists who are willing to discuss the expected outcome of the current climate path are rare: It leads to come uncomfortable truths that our society is not ready to address. In the case of everybody crazy, the hypothesis is that it’s intergenerational. We’re not meant to exist in a society where every adult is required to work forty-plus hours a week (plus breaks, plus commute). We’re also meant to have parents who are not exhausted all the time. The madness is intergenerational, with cumulative family dysfunction getting passed down, as people not only neglect their kids, but self medicate to cope, so they’re even less available.
So, no, the possibility that everyone is crazy is not crazy at all. It’s a product of the industrial age. What’s worse is the psychiatric community is expected to treat it as a medical issue. Toxic work life and toxic home life making you depressed? Here, take some pills. If you can afford to sob at a therapist one hour a week, do so. In any other situation we’d remove the patients from the hazardous area but that would cause the economy to collapse, because that’s the entire workforce.
There are some capitalists who are aware they get better productivity out of their workforce by acknowleding they are human beings, not machines, but those are the rare exceptions. The rest of them believe J. D. Vance has a point. So we’re not going to move towards any rational solutions for a while.
I don’t have any solutions to this.
For my own case, I’ve reframed my own life as a renegade in a society that has, itself, gone entirely rogue. We are the punk in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in. This is your YAF coming of age story where the ministries try to mold you into a solder or laborer for some billionaire’s vanity project, to be used and discarded like a disposable part. Find a way to escape and run!
Or if you’re my age, find the places where Big Brother is blind to your thoughts and actions, and subvert the system from within.