To only see mental health as a direct result of material circumstance is to ignore the fact depression very often doesn’t have a clear external ‘because’. As with cancer there can be social causes but also you can have what appears to be a perfect life and be in absolute pain.
You can be a millionaire celebrity chef (Anthony Bourdain), you can win a Pulitzer (Anne Sexton), an Oscar (Robin Williams), be a ludicrously well paid DJ (Aviici), be born into South Kensington luxury (Virginia Woolf) and still very much experience suicidal depression.
As with physical illness, there’s a social context for mental illness too. See the difference in treatment of people who live where my in-laws live in underfunded Sunderland vs the S East. Plus our consumerist and unequal society causes and exacerbated all kinds of conditions.
My point is there are a variety of ways to come at talking about mental illness that can be useful. A book I have found of most practical has been Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. It is a Buddhist account of suffering and barely mentions society but has real healing value.
It is frustrating to see mental health itself being reduced to another football in the culture wars. Even while writing this thread I’ve had a tweet saying in effect ‘working class people don’t have the LUXURY of depression’ which would be insulting if not so ignorant.
Depression at a severe level, like any extreme pain, takes you outside the world for a while. It can make you feel - even if inaccurate - that your physical surroundings are meaningless. You would be willing to jump into literally anyone else’s life that didn’t feel like you.
Point is: we can come at depression from numerous contexts - social, personal, medical, psychological, academic, autobiographical, even spiritual - and still be able to offer something of use. We need to keep these voices alive. Not silence them.
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