
A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health - eternalban
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/
======
throwaway020620
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
> 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.

------
starpilot
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.

------
denverkarma
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
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
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

~~~
denverkarma
@mattrp, looks like we’re at the max thread depth. Thanks for your comment.

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.

~~~
mercer
I'm surprised that you're surprised. As far as I understand it one of the
fundamental differences between what we generally call 'leftists' and
'liberals' is that the latter think we should solve problems by talking and
trying to understand, whereas the former considers this as silly as expecting
a slave to sit down with his masters and discuss the inconvenience of the
beatings and workload.

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.

------
_bxg1
Is the website dead for anyone else?

~~~
mmastrac
Archive link:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200216142141/https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-
no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health/)

------
austincheney
(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.

~~~
abstractbarista
Are you sure? I thought the "chemical imbalance" story was made up by
pharmaceutical companies to justify their new class of antidepressants.

[https://qz.com/1162154/30-years-after-prozac-arrived-we-
stil...](https://qz.com/1162154/30-years-after-prozac-arrived-we-still-buy-
the-lie-that-chemical-imbalances-cause-depression/)

~~~
austincheney
Yes, I am sure. Drugs are a medical treatment for depression but are not the
only or generally preferred treatment.

~~~
krilly
Have you ever tried to seek treatment for depression? I and others I know have
found it incredibly hard to get any sort of treatment other than the SSRI at
the top of their list.

------
dayofthedaleks
'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/)

------
claudiawerner
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
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
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.

------
heartbeats
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
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
There’s actually some evidence that depressed people perceive the world more
accurately:

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x9j3k/depressed-
people-s...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8x9j3k/depressed-people-see-
the-world-more-realistically)

Happiness might be more a form of delusion, albeit a productive and even
necessary one.

~~~
_bxg1
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.

