Why I’m Depressed: It’s not a Chemical Imbalance
When I was in my 20’s, it was such a reassuring proposition. Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. Everyone who was anyone was saying it at the time, suddenly gaining acceptance, credibility, and praise for owning their ostensible weakness as simply a medical condition that could be cured with medications and talk/other forms of psychotherapy.
Danny Davito, Robert Downey Junior, and so many more were all acknowledging that it wasn’t just a crappy personality or people who couldn’t get their stuff together: depression deserved our collective empathy. And the vehicle to drive compassion? The medical model.
But, you see, the more I learned about depression as a clinical counsellor, the more I had to differentiate between organic depression (ie. the out-of-the-blue severely crippling form that has the potential to destroy families from the inside out that requires significant medications and interventions to stabilize), and situational, environmental, or “inorganic” depression. This situational/environmental form is based on some potent “precipitating factors” that can happen to anyone, at any given time. Some examples are the ending of a job you liked, separating from a life partner, losing a child to child protective services, being overlooked by a racist medical system, incarceration, living and working in a cut-off community or toxic workplace.
I am depressed. My nervous system has slowed down, and now that I am in a safe place, away from those barrages to my nervous system (for me, my precipitating factors were working in a toxic workplace and having an emotionally absent partner and family for a long time), I have the space and time to feel the ouch-factor. That is an understatement: it is exhausting and extremely lonely, as I don’t feel as though I have enough people who know me well that I can readily go to for support, but I am connecting hard with myself and what I know how to do to stay well until I can meet up with those people.
The other elements that have been playing like brown noise in the background that have contributed to my depression are: my parents’ lack of accountability in their abuse toward me and me having to set and enforce boundary after boundary with them until it was necessary to stop all contact after the consistent and unrelenting violation of all boundaries.
Societal Numbing to Crimes Against Humanity:
Society’s obsession with disbelieving survivors of incest so as to give “everyone a fair go” when it’s a miracle survivors aren’t dead from having to “perform credibility” to then be criticized for performing it too well. This haunts me; it is not only personal. I see it everyday in my practice, and I refuse to look way. I challenge myself to make the kind of content, resources, education-rich artifacts I needed when what was happening to me was happening, so that those young people enduring child/youth/adult sexual abuse can identify it and get out.
It is the willful ignorance of people remaining under the delusion that people who are targeted by family members will somehow avoid being significantly effected by it, that all will be well and fine (for some, it is once they leave; for others, it isn’t). To assume that this problem is as solvable via individual talk-therapy alone as it can be for minor social anxiety, is ridiculous. This public social response to sexual assault/incest does nothing to support the requirement of the survivor’s agenda via whatever they want: restorative justice circles, transformative justice processes, a trial (aka criminal justice processes), or nothing (perhaps the rapist died of natural causes not long after they harmed; or maybe they just don’t feel like doing anything, which is fine too. The survivor’s wishes must be centered, not the public’s; and the public can’t wrap their heads around why this is so important.
The public struggles with the quixotic thought trap that those family members who perpetrated will do anything to right the wrongs they committed against their children. And worst of all in my experience, that their children should by virtue of them being their family, the people who gave them life, deserve a second chance, forgiveness, etc. That every parent has that kind of emotional maturity just waiting within them, dormant, but reachable, and that there are sufficient structures and resources to enhance comprehension and enable reunification swiftly, is not a given. That a person who was sexually abused by a family member be forced to forgive them without them wanting to and without supportive public engagement that actively urges the offender to make full, unflinching acknowledgement, repair, amends and then follow the wishes of the survivor, to the tee, is unfathomable.
The naivety that this system will empower survivors to be able to see justice in their lifetimes, that OTHER PEOPLE will know how and what to do, IS ASTRONOMICAL. This is because the public doesn’t know what they don’t know, and because the subject of the detrimental effects of incest and doing something collectively to curb its prevalence, disturbs them to contemplate happening in real life, they won’t. (Give the public a story arc full of incest a la Game of Thrones, and they can’t expose themselves enough to it, funnily… it’s almost like the vast majority of the public believes it only happens in fairytales… how absurd).
YOUR COMFORT WINS, every time. Even when little children, youth and people you claim to love are being harmed every day, afternoon, evening and night.
The ignorance between the public every day Jane’s own behaviour and perspective, and that of those people operating within the system (ie. police, social workers, judges, facilitators, corrections officers, etc.) ARE NOT DISPARATE. They are interlinked, and your bias is showing. Us survivors can see it; you can delude yourself all you like. It’s why the majority of us don’t bother reporting. But, hey, let’s keep going as to other reasons why I’m depressed! Onto the external factors, which the majority of readers may find easier to relate to/want to understand.
Grief of Ecocide:
When it was announced by all major news outlets that the Amazon Rainforest was now producing more C02 than it absorbed, I wept. This is what we’ve been waiting for. When Jeff Bezos spent billions of dollars going to space for a few minutes instead of using that cash to provide free therapy, resources and re-humanizing to organizations such as the Taliban, or boy-solider encampments in Rwanda/Congo, I wept. Why?
Because men by-and-large continue to dominate leadership positions in world-effecting ways, not because they are more well-equipped to do so mentally or emotionally, but because they are simply more comfortable with killing other people (@thatyayalady). This comfort with taking life indiscriminately, is toxic, and as Ece Temelkuran puts it, “the radical male is not at all strong, only an over-inflated act of power. It is, alas, armed with the state apparatus of some of the world’s most powerful nations” (Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now, 2021). These boys and men need other boys and men to dislodge the radically destructive ideology they have been brainwashed with: that competition is the only way, and only domination ensures order, obedience and predictability. It is painful for me to witness the bloodshed and apathy men and boys launch at one another and expect women and girls to pick up after, as though love were only exclusively reserved in all its fullness, to women, girls, or anyone feminine.
The Gender Binary:
See my aforementioned point on how care, love, empathy and cooperation are women/feminine/girl-coded. I decided to come out publicly as non-binary (aka my gender is neither exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine), because the public cannot handle gender. The gender binary is so corrupt and obscene, it has enabled murderers and rapists to get off without having to make amends or repair the damage they committed against female-presenting survivors because those survivors didn’t “say no loud enough.”
In a culture that enforces silence, submission and passivity as norms that women-identifying people are rewarded for by observing (see homes, children, steady income source through affiliation with a “man” usually ensuring these qualities), it is ridiculous to expect a survivor to always be loud to ensure her attacker knows she doesn’t want to be attacked.
The public discourse in many societies as they are run now, by the immature and power-obsessed men we have in leadership following faulty patriarchal ideologies that thrive on subjugation, can’t handle gender. They can barely get a strong grasp on what consent means, how to spot it, and when it has not been given. Therefore, I have “degendered” myself for my own protection, and so it can be easier for me to protect other women, non-binary and trans people, when it comes down to it. It is a strategy, and indeed, a self-serving construct. But my old gender was — as gender always is — a construct too.
This one fits better now.
Capitalism:
My family was beaten into submission ancestrally by English imperialism and capitalism. They are, like the systems that govern justice for sexual assault/incest survivors/warriors, INTERLINKED. (If you think of that scene from Bladerunner 2045 with Ryan Gosling reiterating “interlinked” during his PTSD-testing, you’re not alone.)
My family was so oppressed by the English monarchy, they legitimately believed consciously that their being poor was due to their own character defects. If only they’d gone to grammar school, or college. And in order for them to have been able to do that, they would’ve had to have been born to a wealthier family, in better boroughs, and not have been tradespeople. So, they copied what the imperialist scum of England did to them — my family were originally from Ireland , you know — and moved far south to Africa to rip indigenous African people off. Make them speak English, internalize their own oppression, develop a colonial mindset. Great, it’s all just so great (thanks, sarcasm).
Believing that a wage economy will help people “grow” and right wrongs is naive now. The most powerful and successful nations running with a purely free-market are crumbling now due to international debt and the instability of their social fabrics (see the United States).
So really, what’s this article about? The last thing I want to do is make you feel even more incapacitated by confusion or more depressed by my talking about my own causal factors of depression. I will leave you with this: go out and get yourself in some good trouble, as John Lewis would say. Support non-binary, women-identifying and trans people reminding you that gender is always a construct that that you don’t have to feel uncomfortable with occupying space. Go and speak/ask questions at a sexual assault advocacy place about how you want to learn how to proactively hold people accountable when they offend so that survivors — be they any age — don’t have to do it alone. Volunteer on a sexual assault crisis line; learn the theory, practice the interventions. Talk to the men in your life about what they’re doing, what they’re saying to their friends and male family members about stopping sexual assault and incest from happening. Ask them to form think tanks and mens groups meetings where they hold each other accountable and process their pain at having to be a man in a world where men aren’t trustworthy based on the prevalence of sexual assault/incest in our communities. Don’t leave all of the clean up to those who are already experts but no one listens to us because what we have to say scares you.
Pressure companies to take care of their garbage/recycling before it gets to our stores. Better yet, learn how to fish and hunt/become part of a community that does so you can contribute to it in other ways until you’re proficient. Use that strong, powerful mammal brain to acquire essential survival skills in an egalitarian and feminist way!
And for the love of all that is holy, learn how to farm your own food, build your own house (out of garbage/whatever, think earthships, tiny-homes, etc.) to become completely independent of the housing “market” that keeps us shackled to capitalism as a means of survival. It’s a game. No one should ever be fined, punished, or left to die of exposure because they failed to score well enough at monopoly.
