Mental health is not a topic I particularly want to write about on this blog. It's getting talked about a lot more these days, which is excellent news, of course, but also raises new questions I'm not capable of handling. Once we're talking about it, we immediately run headfirst into how ill-fitting our vocabulary is on the subject. Who gets to be "depressed"? Who is circumstantially depressed and who is clinically depressed? Is there a difference between being perennially miserable and being depressed? Can it be possible that a quarter of our population taking medication to regulate their mood is a state of affairs we should regard as prudent and commensurate? And, whisper it in dark corners, are genuinely depressed people now able to engage in a kind of unhealthy narcissism by blogging endlessly about their innermost feelings under the worthwhile guise of ending stigma?
My suspicion is unsurprisingly related to suspicions of myself - I have deliberately attempted to keep the topics of this blog as far from me personally as possible for fear of what I would do if allowed to wallow in my own emotions with an unlimited wordcount. But I do want to talk a bit about my dealings with depression now, because I think there is a time and place for it, and I feel sufficiently emerged from whatever it was I was in to be a bit more useful in my analysis now.
I received a phonecall telling me I would be doing my current job on Blue Monday, January 9th, and I appreciated the irony of being given the chance the emerge from the darkness on that day of all days, for this new job has given me a level of routine considerably better as a painkiller than any antidepressant. I resolved to write about that irony once the pills had worn off properly. But I can't put a name to whatever-it-was. My struggles with depression? I've never really liked that one, since misery makes me lazy, not in the mood to struggle. Suffering depression? That sounds like an illness, and I have long known people who are clinically depressed and don't wish to insult them by saying whatever-it-was was the same thing they had. If I "suffered" it, I'd prefer to think of it on the level of having a leg in a cast for a couple of months. Which is not the same as a proper illness.
I refer to my dealings with depression because I quite like the image of it as a shady envoy of the local mob turning up at my shop to quietly demand some protection money: not actively threatening, certainly not more so than to any other shop on the street, but just someone to watch warily from the other side of the desk. So that doesn't put me in the same camp as other genuine sufferers, but since everyday language is incapable of making the distinction (as are doctors, to be perfectly honest), it is about depression that I must write, even when good verbs to relate to it are unavailable.
What I wanted to do is put forward a thought on the subject of the West's mental health timebomb, as it is known - because as I say, there is something disturbing about the sheer number of antidepressants needed to keep our society going. It has become a fuel as precious as oil. What are we going to do about it going forward? First, I would suggest two interrelated causes of the explosion. Broadly, these are the explosion of freedom and the concurrent understanding of that freedom. A populace that, with an automated economy and liberal political rights, has a vast number of creative and interesting options to spend their lives on; whether in art, writing, humanitarianism or what have you - but also has the education and popular means of information available to show them those opportunities. Such that an average citizen of the UK has the literacy to write a song, the information from X Factor etc to imagine themselves doing it, the potential free time to write a song, and the understanding that as a democratic citizen, it is their opportunity (if not their right) to become famous as a songwriter.
Everybody's got the right to be happy...
The clockmaker in Nuremberg in the 1700s may have had to worry about war and plague, and I do not suppose that his life was in any way nicer than mine. But were I him, I would have a trade for life and no popular information about what else I could be doing with my life, nor the sense of agency to make it happen even if I did. Such a man needs no antidepressants. Remove the war and the plague, add in the information and the freedom, and suddenly it seems the human constitution provides an automatic stabiliser of unhappiness, so that a free and educated population is miserable simply because it has context. The millenials are swamped in context. What is Facebook but a giant industrial engine of context. Where Jesus Christ was the Great I Am, Facebook is the Great Thou Art Not. You are not your friends, and they are living life to the full and you are not.
A society with that context at its heart is one that will deal with depression as its primary enemy, like the hungry Sparta forever eyeing the creative riches of its neighbour Athens. I am to a modest extent a preliminary victim of that struggle - I won't aggrandise myself by saying I myself struggled, because I did not; I was in the path of a historical whirlwind, and there is no struggling against weather. I have begun to accept my place as a mediocrity, which is a terrible shame given the advantages I started life with. But to dwell on the possibilities is to invite annihilation by regret, and how to deal with regret in this freedom-haunted world is a problem I and my civilisation will have to deal with. Regret has faced unfree humans for generations, it may yet threaten to drown free ones.
I shall have to return to this topic, unfortunately, since I think it is important. But I don't regard it as therapy, or an expiation, or a release. I just think it's there. I'm looking at that little mobster over the other side of the table, wondering exactly who he is and just how dangerous he might become.
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