Success is the best antidepressant. Weight loss does wonders.

Having financial security eases with financial worries to an extent but doesn't entirely solve even that issue nor does it even begin to deal with the unrelated issues. One can be financially secure and absolutely miserable.

That should just be the bare minimum for everyone and whatever other issues can be handled by therapy, but instead we live in a world of constant, easily preventable trauma and the ones who have it the worst have the least access to therapy. Great system!

But if that was true Elon would be the happiest person on earth.

"It all started the day I was born and then things went rapidly downhill from there."

Ain't that something, When you open your car door and it's as if you were baking something, except they smell like steamy mildew, but that sweet hot heat blasts you in the face and it makes you think of the terminator movie.

Two sides of the same coin IMO.

If you're feeling super sad it's natural to worry too much that something else will happen to make you more sad.

You might say, anxiety is a symptom of depression, and depression is also a symptom of anxiety.

That said, while the medications for both are the same, the therapy is not.

I've had chronic pain for 10 years now and every doctor I see tells me it's anxiety and I want to slap them.

Sounds like a very mild case of "billionaire syndrome"

I read the Wikipedia page, it seems to be focused on specifically their assessment of themselves and their impact on the world, not the state of the world as a whole.

I am sorry, but this is nonsense. Even if the world sucks, the logical, smart response would not be dispair and depression, because that fixes nothing.

Also things like looking down on other or defensiveness are symptoms of low self esteem, not a high one. If you really are confident in yourself, you don't need to feel better than others, because you feel good about yourself.

You can understand the world and still try to enjoy your life. The world always sucked and people found ways to cope with it. But that is a skill, that doesn't always come naturally, but you should always strife towards that.

I am sorry, you are going through this, but don't try to rationalize it. It is nearly rational, nor is it an inevitable outcome of high intelligence (this is not a judgement of you personally by the way).

One aspect that I think most don't talk about enough is functional disorders.

Like way back in the day, depression was seen as a sign of weakness and a character flaw. Then we swung real hard to the opposite end and said that depression is completely outside of your control and is just a physical chemical imbalance. And while it certainly can be influenced by inherent brain chemistry, this is still not a particularly holistic understanding of it.

Many disorders, both physical and mental, can instead be thought of as functional disorders that act more like feedback loops. Think about something like tendonitis, it causes swelling, which causes more rubbing, which causes more tendonitis.... Depression amongst many other mental health issues, can function similarly. It saps your motivation which can prevent you from doing stuff or taking action, which makes you more depressed.

Anti-depressants can help you break this loop, but it's also entirely possible for anti-depressants to just 'even you out' enough that you feel no reason to break the loop or make any changes, and then you just end up stuck in the same loop, and just kind of end up numb to everything as a best case scenario.

The research on the long term effectiveness of anti-depressants for relatively mild - mid cases of depression is also still up for debate. A recent Australian public health report was pointing out that most studies measuring the effectiveness sof long term anti-depressant use measure the negative effects from stopping them, but many of these effects are just withdrawal, and once you control for that, they don't look more effective than therapy, but come with a slew of negative side effects.

If you're depressed because life sucks, then you should be motivated to fix what sucks. Unfortunately, that's not how depression works.

Unfortunately, that's not how life works, either. We are beset on all sides by things that suck AND which we have little-to-no power to influence.

This reads like an inner monologue from Disco Elysium.

Ty worse, have you met worser?

you really mean that?

Yup and patriarchy. My father is low functioning and constantly has temper tantrums/outbursts, and it baffled me why the family was run by him. If he was a woman he wouldn’t be the head of anything.

Re capitalism, I never understood why people wanted to have a house and car. It also doesn’t make sense to have most of your assets sitting in real estate and not diversified.

Money makes the world go round, the world go round, the world go round. Of that we both are sure.

But you do understand that money makes other people grow your food, right?

I definitely have both. Before 2016, my anti-depressive medication did an amazing job.

But then there was an election in the US, and that one day made me realize just how fucked we all were in a profound, unmitigatable way. I never looked at the people in my country the same way again, I never looked at the political system the same way again, and my perpetual-hopefulness for the world was completed crushed.

I know some people will say that's overly-dramatic, but those people clearly hadn't been paying attention or connecting the dots. I knew immediately when that election was called that there would be no peaceful way back. All this fascism and violence was written on the wall that day. To be able to recognize the patterns forming, but lacking the ability to stop it (and even being called "alarmist" for pointing it out), meant being stuck in a perpetual feeling of helplessness. It's been 10 years, shit's played out just as I feared it would, and the only sliver of hope I've seen ever since was the rise of Mamdani in NYC. However, awesome as that is, it's just not enough to lift me up anymore.

I also know I'm not alone. We are collectively traumatized, there's no other way to put it. It's going to take a long time for us to heal (if we're able to at all.) The worst part is, this was all done on purpose. Those in charge of the Republican party absolutely, 100% wanted us to feel this way - Project 2025 proved it.

Then there's the non-political stuff that I didn't predict, adding insult to injury. Like a network of cameras being installed everywhere, and gen AI furthering the confusion between reality and fantasy. Oh, and that whole year where the world shut down due to a disease, which was more bizarre than anything I could've expected on that first election day.

Anyway, you're right, there's no amount of nature walks or breathing exercises that can resolve the perpetual stress so many of us are under. I don't want to be a "doomer" but how the fuck am I supposed to not feel doomed? Even if I didn't look around and try to understand the world, there's my own empty wallet, grocery stores full of disease-infected food, all the clothing available is shit quality that starts to unravel before being worn (so it has to be purchased more frequently), and the never-ending bills that get higher even when our wages stay the same. It's not like we're working hard in order to eventually get relief; we're just working hard today in order to survive to work harder tomorrow. There's no end in sight.

Everything truly sucks and now I daily contemplate things that I never thought I would have before, even with my anti-depressants.

Score!

You're not wrong, it can be both. Which sucks.

Hey, bud. I know it sucks where you are. Cycling through different meds made me crazy. Had my emotions all over the place. Eventually just decided to stop and raw dog life. Still not great, but at least the mood is stable and familiar.

And just remember that no matter how bleak your day to day becomes, you never know when happy moments will come around...and they always do. You've just got to hold onto your time til you break through these times of trouble.

Try shrooms then. If you're gonna kys, then you have nothing to loose. It fixed my depression and suicidal ideation for like 6 months with one dose. Lots of scientific studies to back it up too.