#depression

I’d felt this before, when my granddad was in the hospital before he died. We all camped out in the waiting room, eating our meals together, most of us sleeping in the chairs every night. Family from far-flung places would arrive at odd hours and we’d all stand and stretch, hug, get reacquainted, and pass the babies around. A faint, pale stream of beauty and joy flowed through the heavy sludge of fear and grief. It was kind of like those puddles of oil you see in parking lots that look ugly until the sun hits them and you see rainbows pulling together in the middle of the mess. And wasn’t that just how life usually felt—a confusing swirl of ugly and rainbow? ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#death #depression #family #glass-girl #grief

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? ↗

— Mark Fisher

#capitalist-realism #d-g #depression #foucault #ideology

Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of Yoga. ↗

— Kripalvanandji

#depression #spirituality #yoga #spiritual

Luck always seems like it belongs to someone else. ↗

— David Levien

#hopelessness #luck #pain #luck

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression. ↗

— Robert Nozick

#child #crime #depression #drive #examples

Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back. ↗

— Martin O'Malley

#back #bigger #deeper #delano #depression

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come. ↗

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

#american people #come #depression #enshrined #going

It was the height of the Depression, and suddenly I am earning pots of money. ↗

— Ann Rutherford

#depression #earning #height #i #i am

We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We're inheriting a situation - when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises. ↗

— Lawrence Summers

#back #banking #century #crises #depression

Well over fifty years ago I was making radio loudspeakers and radio sets in Rochester, New York; pretty young and inexperienced; but we survived the depression. ↗

— Stuart Symington

#depression #fifty #i #inexperienced #loudspeakers