Depression

A very stray thought riffing off something on Brownfemipower about depression:

BFP commented "This makes me think a lot about the conversation that Sly had over on his site–about how issues like poverty and militaristic violence and racism and all those other ‘isms *create* depression–and yet the *strategies* the medical community have for dealing with this depression is to completely ignore structural oppression and focus exclusively on the individual."

My thoughts on this are extremely tangled and complex, but mostly circle around the isolation of people with depressive disorders. Not only does the illness itself tend to lead to a sense of disconnection, but engaging with it is still something of a social taboo. Admitting to depression is admitting to a "mental illness", something that will make one untrustworthy in some people's eyes, unreliable, defective. People with depression just need to "get over it" because "everyone feels down sometimes". Having depression is somehow the sufferer's own fault, if they were only more virtuous or more dedicated or something like that, it wouldn't happen.

And having that there makes it easy to reinforce the depression and build the godawful bad habits around it -- the I'll-never-get-along thing, the I'm-not-worth-the-time-and-effort thing, the how-useless-am-I-that-I-can't-even-put-the-dishes-away thing. The more stuff in the environment that feeds into those patterns, the more we depressives are taught to cripple ourselves to save everyone else the time and energy.

And there's this shape of the thing -- I know that the rest of my health affects my depression; I've made changes in my diet and my habits to try to build newer habits that don't have this assumption of inability to hack it as a real person. The changes don't always stick so well, because the habit of inability is a deeply-constructed one, full of "I'll only fail, and then They'll tell me how deficient I am, so why bother?" and "If I just retreat far away from everything, nobody will notice me enough to tell me how useless I am."

There are days that I bolster myself against incapacity with lists: today I did about half the work that needs to be done to make one room usable. I got some laundry together, and I'll start it running as soon as I'm done typing. I emptied the dishwasher and put some of the dirties in it. I wrote about moderating my depression with diet and other things, and started thinking about how to fix cultural attitudes that go for the isolation first and the "Here's a meal that's supposed to help with relevant nutrient balances", which is community-building down at the instinctual shared-food level much later on, and ...

... gonna go put the laundry in, now.