The Depressing World

I am Not Depressed-The World Is Depressing

I believe the first time I suffered from withdrawal was just before I didn’t get to graduate high school. I had not applied to college anyway. I had spoken with my father a couple of years prior about my interests and he negated my ideas of possible study as improbable paths to a future success. We had never again spoken on the subject again,and so I guess it was assumed by both of us that I would not be attending. My plans were made and I had a ticket to return to the States a day after our ceremony and a job pretty well lined up to work in the foundry where my grandfather was a foreman.

Then a woman I had been dating, in fact, my first what might be called a steady relationship, had been called off. But she came to visit for lunch one afternoon. I only attended for half days that last year and so I had not yet left for my afternoon classes and since we lived directly across the street from the high school in Ludwigsburg, she had dropped in. My family hired a maid who came in and cleaned our apartment three days a week, and the maid was present that day. My father always left money on the bar that she would collect upon leaving. The young lady and I had retreated to my room, and when we came out the maid had asked, “Ken, wo ist das Geld?” We looked around, and I had seen it on the bar counter earlier, when I had been preparing our lunch. I confronted my companion and she denied taking it. I remembered back to an earlier visit when we were dating regularly and I had run over to the p.x. annex to pick up something for her, I don’t remember what anymore, and I opened my drawer where I kept my money. A few days later I realized it was no longer there and I had asked my sister about it, and even though she denied it at the time, I thought she had taken it and had told her I did not believe her. But now I was pretty certain it had not been my sister, but the young lady. I didn’t go to class that afternoon. I just kind of lay myself on the living room floor to contemplate. I don’t think I felt “depressed”, what I felt was angst at a world that was untrustworthy. When my mother came home,she wanted to know why I was lying on the floor. But I had retreated into a semi-catatonic state and didn’t want to communicate. When I refused to answer, or get up, she called the ambulance and they determined I was not comatose, so they lifted me onto a stretcher and carried me out and drove me to the base hospital in Stuttgart. The doctor on duty put “smelling salts” under my nose until I began to have a physical reaction and then I was sent home,

Since that time, I have noticed that whenever the world seems to me to be overwhelming I can retreat for a couple of days in silence. And as I lay in my silence, my mind reflects until I become refreshed. I have just spent the weekend, or the last 30 hours, basically in one of my periodic retreats.

I have, in the past, been diagnosed as depressed,and I have been given anti-depressants that seemingly have no effect. I mean they don’t work because I have little anticipation that they will work. But my withdrawals do work when I am able to determine what is happening around me and what is upsetting me and how I can address the next days to come. The world does not become less depressing but I am able to work out my approach and then when I am ready, when I feel I no longer cannot deal with the issues that caused my withdrawal, I emerge. The world may be just as depressing, but I am temporarily able to deal with it.

There is much concern today over the growing mental health crisis. But I am of the opinion that the crisis will not be resolved by more mental health and numbing minds with anti-depressants. People do not become depressed because their brains are out of whack, but because the world is out of whack. Solving that societal disharmony, to my way of thinking, is to solve the mental health crisis. Anti-depressants are kind of like soma to numb the minds to accept the inevitable refutation of society of the individual. Numb the mind and let the world continue to attempt to conform the individual to it.

What if, instead, we recognized the social causes, and transformed the society to recognize the importance of its individuals? What if the mental health crisis that Greg Abbott says is responsible for the gun violence in Texas is actually growing because of the gun violence? What if the gun violence and other societal ills that deprive the individual of self respect and confuse the personality are actually what is causing the gun violence as a reaction against that deprivation? What if instead Greg Abbott realized his policies were creating the mental illness and what if he reversed course to “cure” mental illness by addressing the social imbalances (nothing to do with wealth, the wealthy can be just as susceptible to depression or other mental illness) and try to develop communities of togetherness that respected each individual within the community? What if that were the solution to the mental health crisis?

Well there are some questions to be asked, if any choose to do so. But as for me (quoting Joshua) I believe individuals would not suffer from depression

if society did not depress them.