Anxiety = Trying to Keep Things Alive in a Necrophilic Culture. Depression = Knowing That’s Actually Impossible + Being Gaslighted About that Fact. PS. Everything Dies.

Advertising / Media / Cultural Conversation, Capitalistic Patriarchal Medicine, Radical Feminism

What is anxiety?  What is depression?  Why are females in particular often anxious and depressed?  Why are the chronically ill?  Why are the chronically poor?  Why are new mothers?  I hardly think this even merits its own post but I did want to toss it out there because we are clearly being lied to so consistently and so overwhelmingly about the source(s) of our mental, emotional and psychic suffering.  Hint: it’s not an individual problem where some 1/6 of modern Americans — that’s one in six — are taking psychiatric drugs, mostly antidepressants, and mostly taking them long-term.

Here, I would add our intellectual suffering to that list, where particularly women are tasked with keeping things alive under capitalism and patriarchy, including kids, partners, elderly parents, pets, plants, and ourselves, but where literally every facet of our necrophilic culture is stacked against us successfully doing that and where even under the best of circumstances, everything “living” eventually dies.  Thinking beings would tend to react negatively to being gaslit about that or anything — in this case, that it is possible to stop death even under the most biophilic circumstances and capitalism and patriarchy are hardly biophilic.  Do you see where I’m going with this?  This might be a short post.

It seems that some people, perhaps women in particular, are intelligent, thinking beings who may therefore be particularly prone to experiencing crippling cognitive dissonance when we are essentially being asked to believe 2 or more contradictory things at the same time.  In the case of women’s sex (not gender) role under capitalism and patriarchy women are literally tasked with stopping death.  Anxiety much?  We are tasked with keeping things alive but are not granted easy (or any) access to clean (or any) food, water, air, or to shelter, sunlight, exercise, healing medicine, or to the peace we need to make that actually possible but what we are told about any of this does not match the reality of it.  Cognitive dissonance much?  So is so-called depression actually crippling cognitive dissonance?  I’m starting to think it is and that the reason more men don’t suffer from depression is that men aren’t that smart in the first place, where crippling cognitive dissonance would seem to be reserved for frankly the cognitive (and crippling O-pression is reserved for the oppressed).

Query: if so-called depression is actually crippling cognitive dissonance, and I think it probably is, why is it treated (or even treatable) with drugs?  Discuss.

Published by Cannabis Refugee, Esq.

Disaffected Crohn's patient. Cannabis refugee. Attorney. Running away from the Western medical "cure."

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9 thoughts on “Anxiety = Trying to Keep Things Alive in a Necrophilic Culture. Depression = Knowing That’s Actually Impossible + Being Gaslighted About that Fact. PS. Everything Dies.”

  1. Remember “Coffee Talk” on SNL? That is what you reminded of at the end when you said “discuss”.

    Those drugs have absolutely nothing to do with help and healing. I have been on many different psychiatric drugs (at the demand of my husband, of course) and let me tell you, they do nothing to help with the true issue. They cause you to become numb and compliant. In other words, a zombie who is easy to control and oppress.

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  2. My first thought upon waking this morning was: This is bad for me.

    As in, knowing about the state of the world is physically bad for my health. There’s no upside, there’s no punchline, it just is! How’s that for a short post?

    Anti depressants are such a lame topic because someone always comes along to get offended that you’re “shaming” them. I fully DON’T CARE what women do to numb their pain and get through the day, but don’t gaslight me about it. “Chemical imbalance in the brain” lol, get out of my house!

    I fought tooth and nail not to be put on them (along with sleeping pills) when I was 14. It was sooooo obvious they just wanted to make me “easier,” like Michelle says, compliant. Jokes on me, tho, because I’ve been soaked in antihistamines since I was a baby, and they are pretty much the same thing!

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  3. HI Michelle, thanks for your comment! Of course I remember coffee talk! Wow that was a long time ago, haven’t thought about that in forever. Yes the drugs do not “heal” whatsoever especially when you consider the side effects which for some of these psych drugs are terrifying, physical, and permanent. I’ve always thought that if people can’t deal with someone in their house whose behavior or other symptoms they don’t “like” then maybe the person who’s being bothered by it should take the drugs! Haha! Because if you take them YOU are going to be the one dealing with the permanent side effects long after your partner, parents, whoever are dead and/or gone and who will be there to take care of you then when you are even more disabled then than you are now and its from the fucking goddamned drugs that you only took to please other people!? I’m not a people pleaser on my best day but holy shit, that is asking a hell of a lot. And yes, if drugs don’t “heal” then what are they doing? Masking, numbing, and trading one illness for another (or adding new ones without affecting the old one at all) is usually the answer. And men making women take drugs that zombify us and make us easier to control, wow. That just makes me so angry and so sick I don’t even know what to say about it except that it happens all the fucking time. I’m sorry you went through that with your ex and I hope the side effects weren’t permanent!

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  4. Hi Nat, thanks for your comment! That’s so interesting that antihistamines are chemically similar to antidepressants? I’ve never heard that before but it’s interesting enough that I hope I have the energy at some point to look into it and the implications of that. So why does inappropriate immune response and depression respond to the same kind of drug? Well first, does depression even really respond to any antidepressant drug? What about so-called treatment resistant depression, is that different somehow? Is depression an autoimmune condition? I’m trying to figure out what that means. Are our immune systems trying to kill us as a form of compassionate euthanasia where our environment is so shitty we can’t mentally or emotionally survive let alone thrive? I have questions!

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  5. To keep the Capitalism machine going. The predominant paradigm is that those who do not find happiness in American Culture (aka Capitalism) are disordered. The medicine causes us to be more subdued and as a result more easily controlled. If a wife is upset because her hubbie works all the time and is having an emotional affair with the woman at work, an antidepressant will make her situation much more tolerable. The most important thing is to keep people engaged with the Capitalism=happiness myth. That being said I’ve been on antidepressant meds for about thirty years. I don’t know how I would do without them. Anytime I’ve tried to stop them I am plagued with severe mood swings. The antidepressant also stops my obsession with germs and contamination. Without it I wash my hands thousands of times per day to the point where I can’t do anything but that. There are about a handful of times I’ve narrowly escaped suicide, and I can’t put myself at risk of that because I have a son. I’m still depressed, of course. But it’s a tolerable depression, I’m used to it. And I’m chronically ill which tends to come with depression as a side effect. I’ve been ejected from the Capitalism game due to disability, so no one actually expects me to be happy, anyway. Antidepressants are to treat the cognitive dissonance, and opiates are for withstanding the physical damage of sacrificing the self to work. That’s why Americans are having such a love affair with opiates right now. Opiates increase your ability to be productive by making your brain less aware of the pain signals your body is sending. Now here’s an interesting idea that I bet no one is considering. If females are the highest users of antidepressants and have a higher incidence of chronic pain, wouldn’t it be useful to study what the effects of long term antidepressant use are on the body? What if we find out one day that long term use of antidepressants are largely responsible for our chronic pain epidemic (including chronic fatigue, epstein barr, fibromyalgia, Lyme, auto-immune disorders)? Silly me, we will never see a study like that because it would really throw a wrench into the Capitalism machine. We only do studies that create fuel for Capitalism, not those that might detract from it.

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  6. Hi OSS, thanks for reading and for your thoughtful comment! Yes, anyone who is not happy and fulfilled via capitalism is disordered. That’s exactly it, which means that anyone whose “happy” is bothered by extreme pollution, torture including medical experiments, displacing indigenous people/genocide, overwork and using humans as resources especially women, tyranny and implied and actual violence, silencing and othering, extreme wealth disparity and other “features” (not bugs) of capitalism are by definition mentally ill. Realizing that it is therefore no true measure of health to be unfazed by any of that and happy not despite it but because of it does not help much if at all when you are the one being othered where the consequences of being othered are so severe (death, essentially, after a long period of torture otherwise known as homelessness) and trigger the survival instinct and panic. Good point about antidepressants deadening the emotional pain and opiates deadening the physical pain of essentially waiting in a white box to be overused by your employer — this is the life of workers under capitalism and yes, it does seem as if a huge and growing population simply isnt able to physically do it anymore. Mentally we’ve been fucked for a long time but now that we physically can’t do what we’ve always mentally known we shouldn’t be doing anyway — this may be unprecedented? Now that everyone is sick or getting sick and being “ejected” from the game, what happens now? Everyone just ignores us I guess and the ones who physically CAN keep doing it will, and will walk all over the sick and dying to catch their connection to nowhere. I have not used antidepressants long term but I have used antihistamines long term, which is interesting isnt it, especially if they are the same thing like Nat suggests? So-called side effects are no joke. I never took them seriously because I never took medicine I didn’t really NEED to keep my body running like a machine in order to work, in order to survive. It’s not like they don’t tell us what the side-effects are, we just can’t afford to care.

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  7. Also, OSS, do you have a blog? I see that the one that is linked to in your username has been deleted. Do you write anywhere else? I’m always looking for thoughtful blogs to read, especially written by anti-capitalists and now, by the chronically ill.

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