I’ve been on SSRIs for years — I’ve bounced back and forth on my view of depression. I think my brain is likely prone to respond to certain stressors in a depressive way, due to a combination of genetics and years of conditioning/“practice”. It seems possible to me that I could learn, via a combination of things like therapy and meditation, to notice and control my brain’s reaction to those stressors. But at the same time, “chemical interventions” like SSRIs have also seemed to help.
Everything in your brain is chemicals, but beyond that, external influences can I think cause very deep, "low-level" changes in your brain, that end up feeling more like chemical imbalances than they do like being upset about some particular thing. Like, the thought "I'm sad my partner left me" is made of chemicals, but I think depression operates on a much lower level than that of conscious thoughts like those, even when induced by some external stressor.
When I pay attention to my own mood, I can sometimes notice specific things that trigger feelings of depression. Something stressful happens, I'm worried about something, etc., and I'll react by getting depressed. But the depression doesn't feel like it's tied to whatever just happened. I'm not sitting there being like "omg I'm so sad about X" -- I just feel depressed: I'm not getting much joy out of anything, nothing seems interesting or exciting, I'm not looking forward to anything, etc.
It's only when I force myself to take a step back and ask "what might have happened recently to cause me to feel depressed?" that I'll realize "ah yes, X just happened, that's probably why I'm feeling depressed right now". But even after that realization, the depression _still_ feels disconnected from the stressor. My conscious brain knows that the depression was probably caused by X, but my subjective experience of the depression is still disconnected from X.
I guess this is kind of analogous to waking up with back pain, wondering "what did I do to my back?", and realizing "ah yeah, it was X". Realizing what caused your back pain doesn't somehow alleviate the back pain -- the damage is already done. You can maybe try to do X more carefully in the future, but even that is no guarantee that X won't cause you back pain again.
I think we like to think that because our brain is where our consciousness and ego and thoughts are, that we can control it in a way we couldn't control other body parts, like our backs. And that we ought to be able to "will away" mental pain in a way we couldn't just "will away" back pain. But that's not always the case; the brain's just another organ.
I've come to the conclusion that a lot of what we call the mental health epidemic is really just late capitalism being fundamentally unable to meet human needs of spirituality and emotional belonging.
There's nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a means to an end in an economic sense, but as an ideology and identity (as is especially pervasive in the US), it's extremely toxic. Capitalism in this sense dehumanizes people, and rewards and encourages lack of empathy and sociopathy. We're taught that it's OK to let people be homeless, starve, and die preventable deaths from lack of healthcare because it's their fault for not being able to succeed in a system that is designed to profit off their failures. We're told we can't fix these because of insufficient means, but in actuality it's a question of prorities and not wanting to midly inconvenience wealthy people to share small portions of their wealth to support the society from which they extract their wealth.
Being in constant fear for your survival because your wages haven't increased in years while the cost of healthcare, food, housing and education keep increasing is disastrous for mental health, that shouldn't be surprising at all. If you're in that position you might be told that your employer can't afford to pay you enough to survive, when in actuality they likely still have healthy profits that are redistributed only to senior management and shareholders.
Learning about the concept of internalized capitalism was a game changer for me. Once you decouple your self-worth from your perceived productivity for the economy/society (aka your value to wealthy elites), it's a lot easier for you to accept yourself and stop blaming yourself for something that's totally outside your control that you perceive to be as a personal failure.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2021/06/...
When I say capitalism, I'm mainly referring to it in the sense of "internalized capitalism", as an ideology. It's the idea that your self-worth is only as valuable as your income or economic output and that if you aren't capable of that, you aren't worthy of basic things like shelter, food, and healthcare and therefore don't deserve to live since you are a burden on hardworking people with money. I'd really encourage you to research that since it can help untangle assumptions you might have about yourself, based on what society has been teaching you is the "right" way to live and what expectations you should have of yourself.
I think the things we think of as societal trends contributing to social decay have capitalist ideology and assumptions as the underlying thing that ties them together. Capitalism promotes individuality over communities sharing resources because that increases consumption, since then everyone needs to buy their own instance of something. You're expected to leave home at 18 because that's just what you're supposed to do to be a "normal" young adult, even if you're not financially or emotionally ready, and that also means that you have to consume more to support yourself instead of your parents continuing to share with you. We're taught that "greed is good" and hoarding individual wealth and power is better than making small sacrifices to ensure the well-being of everyone in the community.
Personally, rejection of religion was a positive for me, since at a young age I recognized the hypocrisy of Christianity as it was being practiced versus how it was presented in the gospels. This article written by a priest articulates this feeling that I've had for a really long time, that most of what is called Christianity in the US barely resembles it:
> Inasmuch as the two major political parties in America are both “liberal” in the classical sense—the one devoted a bit more to something like John Stuart Mill’s economic philosophy, the other a bit more to something like his social philosophy, and neither of them to the communal ethics of Christian tradition—it is hard for most Americans to make sense of such views. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism
My self-esteem improved immensely once I became an atheist and stopped guilting myself and tried to stop living up to others' expectations of how I should think and act, and this helped me become a more open-minded and empathetic person. Though, I will admit that although there's a lot to be gained from rejecting organized religion (as a human institution), there's also a void of community and spirituality that's left.
Anyway, thanks for being open about your struggles.