Our civilization is collapsing. Why shouldn’t we feel bad?
We’ve exhausted the natural resources our planet took a billion years to store up, we live in suffocating, overcrowded, polluted, horrifically stressful conditions, and we have launched the planet into the 6th global extinction.
Depression is a sane response to a crazy world.
Gary Greenberg: The diagnosis is detached from where depression might come from.
More than 14 million suffer from major depression, 3 million suffer from minor depression longer than two years. These numbers are ridiculous — not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness.
“Well, if people are encouraged to think of external circumstances, then they may be more empowered to take action.”
Of course, as Mind Hacks points out, “One difficulty with their proposal, however, is that while they admit that social problems are one of the most common triggers for depression, they miss out the many studies that have found depressed people and, especially depressed people who ruminate, are reliably worse at social problem solving.”