The Politics of Depression

by **Hobb** Fri 9 Feb 2018 - 13:52

Teaching sociology was never anything I wanted to do, I'm just not that social a person, but after all these years I have found many hidden truths in sociology that I would never encountered elsewhere. One of these core truths is that many problems that individuals blame themselves for have social causes and social solutions, we are just so pathological stuck on individualism we cannot see it.

The economy is openly predatory but we blame ourselves for not being good enough workers, social life is hollowed out by endless debts and precarious work but we wonder if our brain's chemicals are doing something wrong, North American media is constant war propaganda and cops v. rapists and we wonder why we are not as optimistic as we used to be.

The Real News Network usually does just politics but this video entitled 'Depressions is Not Just Personal, But Also Neoliberal'. It gives a good dose of the sociological viewpoint that places many of our percieved individual failings into their larger cultural context.

So, there's a really fascinating one in Canada in the 1970s, and the Canadian government chose seemingly at random a town called Dauphin. It's in Manitoba. And they said to a big load of people in this town, "We're going to give you from now on in monthly installments a guaranteed basic income." It was the equivalent of $15,000 a year in today's money. Said to these people, "There's nothing you have to do in return for this money and there's nothing you can do that means we'll take it away. It's just we want you to have a good life." And this was monitored by a wonderful social scientist I didn't speak with, Dr. Evelyn Forget, many really interesting things happened, but one of the most fascinating is there was a really significant fall in depression and anxiety. In fact, severe depression and anxiety that was so bad people had to be taken to hospital and shut away, fell by nine percent in just three years. And as Dr. Forget said to me, "That's an antidepressant, right? Universal basic income is an antidepressant."

"When you're a child," and you're speaking about childhood experiences that are painful. "When you're a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can't move away or force somebody to stop hurting you, so you have two choices: You can admit to yourself that you are powerless, that at any moment you could be badly hurt and there's simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it's your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power, at least in your own mind. If it's your fault, then there's something you can do that might make it different. You aren't a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You're the person controlling the machine."

He discovered that 55 percent of the people on the program had begun to put on weight after being sexually abused. What he discovered is this thing that looked like a pathology, their obesity, actually made sense. As Susan put it to him, "Overweight is overlooked and that's what I needed to be."

JOHANN HARI: Depression and anxiety are not pathological malfunctions, they're legitimate signals that something's gone wrong in the culture.
So, the response of the psychiatric authorities was just to get rid of the grief exception. It doesn't exist anymore. So, now if your child dies at 10:00 a.m., you can be diagnosed that morning with depression and anxiety and mental illness. You can be drugged. In fact, Dr.

Cacciatore has shown 32 percent of grieving parents are drugged in the first 48 hours. And what that shows is, as Dr. Cacciatore puts it, we just don't understand pain. Grief is not a malfunction. We grieve because we've loved someone.

AARON MATÉ: It's a response.

JOHANN HARI: It's a tribute to our love for that person. And in a similar way, depression is a form of grief for our own lives not going right. Now when someone we love dies and there's grief there, all we can do is hold the surviving people and love them. But with grieve for our own lives, the solution is that collectively and together we can change our lives so it meets our needs more deeply.

But the next stage of his research I found incredibly encouraging, which was once people had indicated they'd experienced these childhood traumas, the doctors were told next time there person comes in, just say a script to them.

The script was, "I see that when you were a child you were sexually abused, whatever it was. I'm really sorry that happened. That should never have happened to you. Would you like to talk about it?" And a lot of people said, "No, I'd rather not talk about it, thank you," and a lot of people did want to talk about it. And they talked on average for five minutes about it and at the end of that the doctor said I can refer you to a therapist to talk more about this if you want. Just that act of five minutes of an authority figure saying this should never have happened to you led to a really significant fall in depression and anxiety over the following year. People who were referred to a therapist had a 50 percent fall.

And what that tells us is that releasing shame is incredibly, we know, for example from the AIDS crisis, openly gay men died on average two years later than closeted gay men even when they were diagnosed at the same time. Shame destroys people. There's a reason why almost all human societies got some form of confession. Turns out Catholic church does had something right every now and then. So, back to me, and again, when I sort of absorbed that, how unethical it was to tell people it's just a chemical imbalance in your brain, right?