[Liquix]

Some people's brain chemistry makes feeling happiness much more difficult. Some people with clinical depression will physically never experience happiness the same way others do. That's true and valid.

But does that really mean that being happy is not a choice?

A paraplegic is unable to choose to move their legs due to a medical condition - would they assert that 'moving your legs is not a choice'?

[chongli]

I'm extremely skeptical of the brain chemistry narrative. It doesn't explain why depression is growing rapidly in the Western world. It doesn't explain why antidepressants vary so widely in their efficacy between persons.

I'm far more apt to believe that people's lives are getting worse and that they're depressed as a result. People are lonelier than ever and society's problems are bigger and more abstract than ever.

We're no longer even cogs in a machine, we're atoms in a cog. Meaning in life has become extremely elusive.

[beat]

That's like saying there wasn't cancer before cancer was first diagnosed. I don't think clinical depression is becoming more commonplace. I think it's becoming more recognized. I'm old enough to predate modern drug treatments for depression, but as a child, I saw plenty of untreated depression around. I recognize it for what it was now.

[Liquix]

I completely agree. As Chamath Palihapitiya (ex-Facebook) eloquently puts it, our technology culture is 'ripping apart the social fabric of how society works' [0]. We're social creatures who thrive on human interaction and sharing genuine moments - social media gives us the exact opposite [1].

The really insidious thing is that many of the big players and driving forces behind these trends saw it coming, knew that what they were building may have far-reaching negative consequences, and then chose to do it anyway for the sake of money. What a time to be alive, right?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78oMjNCAayQ

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853817/

[MaxBarraclough]

Not trying to sound smart here, but if that's your position, why did you go with Some people's brain chemistry...?

[Liquix]

I believe that a small percentage of the population is born neurochemically imbalanced (classic clinical depression), but also that the recent rise in anxiety and depression rates is mainly caused by societal and technological factors.

[dragonsngoblins]

It is easy to explain why antidepressants vary wildly even if all depression is caused by issues in brain chemistry: the constellation of symptoms we define as "depression" is actually several different illnesses that respond to different treatments.

This is why when people start on antidepressants it is a process of trying different ones until they find one that works.

[claudiawerner]

This is so right; Mark Fisher was a prominent author in left-wing/radical circles; he took his life after a long struggle with depression, which he warned and wrote about continuously; an excerpt:

> “Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

Some good articles on the political-economic phenomenon of depression, the response of mainstream treatment techniques and mental health in general:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...

https://www.rs21.org.uk/2014/04/27/kpunk/

[ionised]

Depression isn't attributable to any one cause. For some people it is clinical and biological, and these people need medical treatment and therapy; sometimes for their entire lives.

Then there is the depression you get after a bad relationship, or as you said, an increasingly individualistic and adversarial consumer society that goers against our social instincts.

[claudiawerner]

On the brain chemistry idea, there's an interesting quote about how this idea is used (regardless of its theoretical validity) to push a certain narrative:

> “The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”