The Politics of Depression

It appears there is concern that such enormous numbers of people are living drugged for depression. Oh deary me, why are so many dependent on nasty chemical pills that cost the NHS so much?

It's true that there is too much reliance on drugs drugs drugs. But then that means money for the drug sellers.

For a great deal of depression one of the best remedies is simply exercise. It stimulates the cheerful hormones.
The difficulty is that depression itself makes doing exercise very very hard to do. It makes a person desperate to stop, slump, give up. That's its nature. A system of encouragement and coaching would go a long way.

But beyond exercise, healthy eating, meditation, the elephant in the living room is the appallingly depressing society we live in.

Depression is political.

Since 1979, we've lived through 30 years under two long Governments by supposedly different parties, and our society has been ruthlessly engineered to centre on wealthy people getting wealthier. Inequality hasn't been greater since before the World Wars.
This destruction of our society, once beautiful, has been like a juggernaut of destruction ridden though every human value, every piece of kindness, beauty, safety and health that made up a decent society.


Violence rules our streets and invades our homes. Domestic violence and rape are an epidemic. Police are useless unless you are rich.
Drugs destroy huge numbers, not just addicts, but their families and lovers. But a lot of money is made from drugs.
Alcohol is freely sold everywhere, every other shop sells it, at all hours. Young people are dying of it through disease. It's fuelling violence everywhere. But it makes money.

Women, girls, boys are bought and sold, whether for full sex or bits of sex stopping short of coitus. They aren't the ones making the big money.
Almost all parents are forced out to work by crazy property prices, leaving children neglected, to grow up into yet more violence, drugs and robotic lives.
Films games and popular books glorify violence, make booze part of almost all everyday events, reduce sex to a physical grunt. More money is made.

Jobs are insecure, pensions a joke, unemployment support strips life of dignity and comfort. The money saved isn't going to ordinary people.
Families are torn apart by the drugs, alcohol, violence everywhere, financial insecurity, debt.
Community projects go unfunded, collapse. Post Offices are closed that are vital centres of community life, and privatisation blights community networks.

Thousands of families have their children threatened by insane social services, getting fat fees for extracting perfectly healthy kids for adoption.
Hospitals are places of terror where you wait hours or days in pain for emergency treatment; or die because an operation becomes available too late. If you do get in you risk dying of hospital infections. Crowded wards with mixed sexes, dirt, impossibly overworked staff, make it a misery being there.
New mothers are dying of the Victorian puerperal fever because cost cutting throws them on the street within hours of giving birth.
Our elders are forced into institutions that then abuse them and neglect them. Life reduced to mechanical survival. Money thinking.

Education and opportunity is no more unless you're rich or take on massive debts.
Banks lie to people and persuade them it's safe and sensible to borrow money they can't afford to repay. Then bailiffs can knock your door in, or knock you to the floor, in order to take your possessions away.
Aggressive companies constantly invade our privacy, or threaten us, or cheat us.
An aggressive government invades our privacy, and plans to do it more efficiently with databases, forced 'home visits', cameras, ID Cards and tracking us. Because it all helps certain businesses make money.

Try to complain about any of it - it gets you nowhere. Poorly paid junior staff give scripted answers, acting as a buffer group so the wealthy mangement can't be touched. Complaints drag on for years building fat files, making huge money for lawyers, winning perhaps a grudging sorry, or rarely, some money: but nothing is improved about what happened.
Public consultations are smokescreens. Afterwards the wealthy do what they wanted to do anyway.
Consultants make big money to hold meetings, write reports, for projects that don't happen, or cause wreckage in our lives. But consultants are not accountable for what they do.

Meanwhile MPs earn four times what we do, and on top, cheat to get massive expenses, free (expensive) houses etc.
Companies are demanding we work for nothing (unpaid overtime, 4 day week).
Redundancy and repossession stalk us.
Fatcat directors roll in money that they rip out of the national economy that supported them and let them do it.
Bank directors and managers get massive payouts for wrecking our lives with forced debts, cheating us, terrorising us, overworking us, repossessing us.

It's ALL about putting money first. Is it surprising people are depressed?
We once had a decent society. Until the 80s.

Depression is suppressed, helpless anger.