All that we are is only seldomly all that we seem. The contemporary work-life-imbalance has effectively eradicated any trace of personal agency, individualism and the act of working towards something (which is not to be confused with the more propagated form of it, working collectively towards something but not necessarily out of a sense of urgency). Even more pressingly, is has homogenized our general sense of how we approach the topic of “health”, in whichever way one might interpreted that statement. More concretely, modern work life has subjugated different circumstances of sub-par physical or mental health into categories that are then equated to days off from work, as if one would be designated to feel better after the allowed “free time” – which, when confronted with pain, only seldomly really is free – and return to the scheduled program. Yet, what if one of the causes for many of today’s mental ailments are the precise structures in which we mask our functioning?
Now, to simply generalize this as much as the previous sentence does would certainly be erroneous, for mental illnesses are, as the name clearly states, illnesses and are to be taken as such. Yet, it could most likely be said that the modern life parameters do not offer the framework for the mentally ill to be treated, let alone healed. To do so, the mentally ill person would, firstly, have to declare their ailment, which in it of itself is like the task of moving a mountain. Since, last we checked, one cannot visualize a mental illness like, for example, depression, the mentally ill would need to first accept their condition, then rationalize it and then start to speak about it. This is precisely where many, understandably, already fail. Up until recently, illnesses like depression have still been seen by most (not suffering from it) as the mental equivalent of a chipped tooth, a paper cut that just needs a quick round of bandaging. Depression has been, in vain, treated as something for which there must not only be quick fix but also as something that is easily surmountable under pressure or external circumstances. Since the metaphorical mountain of depression cannot be really seen – except in the more extreme and severe cases and consequences like suicide and self harm – it can be easy to dismiss it entire, especially when the person judging the depressed person is, by chance, not depressed themselves. You see, depression, more than an illness, I would consider a very peculiar and particular kind of feeling, not a mood, but a feeling; one that, against all odds, becomes so big and seems to swallow up every other feeling beside it that almost nothing can coexist with it. This is perhaps why the standardized “depressed person image” – which, to some extent is certainly valid – usually is the bedridden person, not even being able to cook decent meals for themselves and surviving – because we cannot call that living – on junk food and sodas. As mentioned, this is certainly a valid mental image, for lethargy is a side effect of depression, but I think it could be more appropriate to not subdivide depression into actions, non-actions and their consequences but the merge all of them into one cacophony of obliterating emotions that don’t really quite know where up and down is. The bed-rotting thus is not necessarily a consequence but a necessity given the conditions of the ill; a way in which the all-encompassing feeling of depression can coexist with a state of semi-hibernation that is poignantly contrary to the way in which we live the rest of our lives, just as depression seems to be the perfect antonym to the way in which the structure of our work-life-balance have been built to alleged perfection.
Even more precisely, one could argue that the state of bed ridden depression is nothing more than the visualization of a particular kind of dialectic, the dialectics of waiting. The depressed person is, under such circumstances, essentially in the thralls of something they, without the use of medication, cannot control for, as we have mentioned, the feeling of depression consumes everything else. All that the depressed person can now do – if they have the luxury to allow themselves a break from “reality” – is wait. This wait is not dissimilar to the kind of wait one experiences right before a doctors appointment, where one is asked to take a seat in the recreational area of the office and reassured that the doctor will be right with them. Here, the patient suffers the unfortunate fate of temporarily being in a quasi-reality, one in which the reality of the situation is not to work towards something but to wait for something to work itself out. The only difference is that, in the doctors office, the doctor will actually, eventually and against all odds, come and lead you into their personal office, whereas the wait for a depressive, bed-ridden period to be over can, at times, also yield little to no results. Yet, this type of waiting is certainly not devoid of any action at all, for the consumption of media content during a bed-ridden, depressive episode is at an all time high, meaning that, while not physically doing something, the depressed person is still engaging with the world – even if only in a unilateral way – a great deal, perhaps even more than they would be able to under working conditions. Furthermore, these bed-ridden episodes do not mean that the depression is alleviated or that it is repressed, but actually that existence beyond the parameters of assumed lethargy have become unbearable and that, practically speaking, depression wins over the fragmented body. Depression centers the body into one giant blob of internalized pain and omits living outside of this pain, but the pain, the depression-feeling is front and center, even while waiting. While under any other circumstance, to do something about anything requires some kind of action, the depression person, even under the guise of laziness, does everything in their power to speed the process of waiting up, even just a tiny bit, and to get back on their feet.
In fact, I would argue that the wish of the generalized depressed person to wallow in their depression and thus remain depressed is a complete farse. If not for some latent sado-masochistic tendencies, the depressed person is acutely aware of the nature of their conditioning, precisely because it is so alien to every other structure that we have implemented in every day life. The know that this “thing”, this feeling that is dictating their every breath, is not their friend. In fact, if it were friendly, it would offer the depressed person ways out – that are not related to suicide – of their depressed state, but depression wants to keep you at bay. It feeds off of every ounce of implicit solitude, masks itself as your friend but not quite well enough to fully trick you, because friends don’t leave you breaking down in tears. The state of the depressed person becomes allegedly anachronistic to life’s inner workings, but one ought to remember that these inner workings are always negotiated anew. In medieval times, for example, it was normal to work one hundred and fifty days a year, and the rest were yours to keep. In a capitalistic system where, at times, two jobs are not enough to pay the bills, it should be wonder that anybody in their right mind is not in a state of constant negotiation with life itself. The depressed person has become an anomaly, even in parameters masked as centered around helping the depressed person. Psychiatric help and therapy, for example, are systems in which the depressed person is tasked with making a choice – which, depending on the circumstances, is already much more than what they might be able to give – of either waiting for a potential therapist to take them on as a new patient or not calling at all. To all, the first choice sounds much more reasonable, up until one discovers that the waiting period is often months in advance, as if the depressed person becomes a casualty, a roll of the dice of whether they will even be alive when the time for therapy comes. The depressed person, thus, given the ramifications of capitalism onto and into everything, even the things that weight but cannot be seen, is sure to be frustrated by a system that already frustrates them to begin with, turning what seems like a helping hand into a double-edged sword. The depressed person becomes isolated as an individual catastrophe and the help that is offered is circumstantial and depended not on the willingness of the depressed person’s wish to get better – as it is often made out to be – but of a capitalistic system actually being able to acknowledge that help is needed through resources like time, professional, medicine and have you. The two, unfortunately, seem more like parallel journey rather than intersecting, perpendicular objectives.
It seems that, if one considers depression as, allegedly, alien to life, the so called depression-life is not a life worth living. This is certainly untrue, for in fact depression is merely a facet of life; the problem arises when this facet of life – for of what would it else be, given that we human being are, ultimately alive and the dead don’t suffer – is superimposed into the bigger, more austere facet of life called “everything but depression”, with which the depressed person has trouble merging, and for good reason. Modern life is not equipped with dealing with depression, so how could the depressed person ever be able to themselves, on their own, seemingly perennially straying from life itself? Under these conditions, the depressed person is seen, by many, as a singular emergency, whereas the real question should be as follows: how is modern life able to accommodate depression in making it not worse as it already is? It is perfectly natural that somebody who might need to feed their family will resort to a job they might hate, which, in the long run, is detrimental to the psyche as a whole, no doubt. Now, it is important to not make depression out to be a side effect of something but a real illness that, sometimes, simply is, they say because of a chemical imbalance in the brain. Yet it is also true that external factors like inflation, for example, – something the depressed person in and of themselves can do nothing about – will certainly not aid the illness but exasperate it. Equally as true, arguably, is the fact that, for those that are apt enough to observe the world around them, to recognize these problems and not to simply feel them as a burden is even more catastrophic for the already depressed person, for these external circumstances suddenly add onto the weight of unchangeable parameters the depressed person is suffering from (or their presumed impossible solvability). The depressed person, in my opinion, has every right to see these things as adding to the already present burden, especially if they become dependent on them against their free will, which suddenly does not seem so free anymore.
So what is it that we do to alleviate the pain of depression? Well, we cram “scheduling grief” into our calendar and seclude it from the rest of the world. We arrive late to work and, when asked, we say that we had a “long therapy session”, and the question seems asked and answered. The contents of this therapy session, if ever one gets to it, are not to be disclosed with others, or so it would seem; there looms a secrecy over the mental anguish of the depressed that is akin to the way in which certain business secrets are kept, only reserved for the selected few. But why? I mean in terms of depression, not business, of course. Why, especially in the golden age of digitalization, is it still so frowned upon to at least mention the topic enough to give it the integrity it would deserve? It could be arguable that through disclosure, those privy to it might feel a sense of obligation towards the depressed person (especially those not depressed) to make them feel better, to say that they are not alone and the usual script of situations like these. This is certainly better than turning the cold shoulder, but is it ever honest? Is the empathy ever coming from a place of sincere worry or out of the collective, unconscious guilt of not being depressed, thus forming a hierarchy in mental wellness where depression, decidedly, falls at the bottom of. Perhaps thus, in the eventual loss of class-culture, the only one remaining except for the “rich vs. the poor” is the “depressed” and the “not depressed”, where the not depressed are clinically sane. The not depressed are able to circumvent their lives much freer around the constraints of modern capitalism; they might see it’s faults and edges, but they finds solace in compliance. The depressed become even more depressed through compliance and the cycle feeds on its own ouroboros-like self. EXPAND
Beyond this, the depressed person might also become even more depressed because they are able to visualize and think of a future in which their depression could be alleviated by external changes dependent or independent of their own life’s choices, yet these changes, at least those outside of the scope of what can be done with and in a life, can only seldomly be achieved. Thus, the depressed person gets the moniker of being a “dreamer”, but I would consider a different word more appropriate: the envisioner. The envisioner is different from the dreamer, because the dreamer does not know about his own delusion, whereas the envioner is more grounded in the fabric of reality as they know it. The dreamer wants to break capitalism, but the envisioner simply wishes to loosen the noose of capitalism here and there for them to be able to breathe a little better, metaphorically and certainly also physically (for we know that depression’s consequences are not only abstract but certainly concrete with acts like overconsumption or underconsumption of, for example, food in deep, depressive episodes). The envisioner hates the dreamer because the also wish they could find solace in delusion, but they cannot. They are too busy finding actual solutions to seemingly never-ending problems, for as long as one lives with depression, the mind might come up with a few questions and remarks here and there, unfortunately. The dreamer can be observed as being almost thankful for their condition, for their ability to go beyond the scope of the horizon, whereas the envisioner is disappointed by the very same scope of the very same horizon, thus envision a slightly different horizon that wouldn’t be as catastrophical as the one presented. It is perhaps only in art that the depressed can go beyond their own version the scope of a horizon and find some kind of absolution in the prospect/lie – depending on who you ask – of there being “something more” to life, but this certainly does not mean that the depressed person relishes in their own depression when in a creative state, nor that the depressed need to be depressed to be creative. This is nothing but a Hollywood-ization of the stereotypical trope of the “tortured artist”, which couldn’t be farther from the truth, for in a real, depressive state, the creative output will mimic the flocculence of the spirit and thus resulting only in mediocre works. No, the depressed, under creative conditions, actually feel themselves matter, because the action they are doing is intrinsic to their own livelihood, their own being and,the can see the progress – meant in the most factual sense of the word – right in front of them, something that cannot be said for almost anything under capitalistic conditons, as one of its most salient, efficient procedures is that of alienating the supply and production chain from the individual, giving the impression that “we are all working towards a shared goal” when, in reality, those at the bottom of the feeding-chain know absolutely nothing about what, how and why they are doing the things the seem to occupy a majority of their lives with. This ladder way of living is, for most, completely normal. Let me reiterate: this is not normal, and only because something is done by the majority of people does not make it normal, just like heterosexuality, in comparison to homosexuality, should not be seen as a standard but just as a part of the erotic experience. If we keep treating depression and the depressed as completely alien to the not depressed, as incapable to kneeling to structures that, quite apparently, hurt them, the only democracy we deserve is one of mass suicide; a mass suicide that aptly shows that depression is a collective hurt and not an individual one and that there are structures that reinforce this kind of hurt and structures that aid it’s alleviation, but it seems that the ladder of the two is a utopia and the former only what we now call reality.
