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.
Cannabis Refugee, Esq. 