I’m so glad you brought up this topic. I had reached the conclusion that depression is by and large the result of one’s inability to accept or control unfavorable circumstances, and not so much a matter of chemical imbalance. Barbara Branden, on OL, tried to convince me that I needed drugs to solve my problem, but I have a compelling believe that the problem is caused by some deep-rooted premises.
In my case, I could over-simplify the situation and blame my depression on the government. The town is in the process of seizing my otherwise fully-owned home for back taxes. This is causing me great stress. I thought I could solve my problem by making a lot of money through selling life insurance and financial services as an agent of a large company. Then I realized that my personality just isn’t the type that “wins friends and influences people.” After months of zero success in recruiting and selling to the cold market, I began once again to sink into hopeless depression.
I would think: if the government would only leave me alone, I could be happy enough on the $6,000/year I earned as a freelance JoaT (Jack of all Trades), doing a little video here, a little graphic design there, a little radio work there, etc. But I realized that I can’t change the unfair nature of property taxes. Stealing from the poor may not seem like a popular thing, politically, but towns evict scores of senior citizens every year after jacking up taxes to the point where one is paying the original purchase price of their home, twice a year today, in taxes—and the public doesn’t seem bothered by this.
I concluded that I need to figure out what’s been stopping me from making more than poverty wages for more than fifty years, and that, I believe, leads to an investigation of premises.
It is hard to live as a rational being in an irrational society with inane laws that make the rational person very angry just to think about there devastating effects on free people. But it isn’t going to change any time soon, as the Socialists and the Kantian thinkers are in control of the educational system and it perpetuates and grows. Just thinking about the losing battle we Objectivists are fighting is enough to make me depressed. But for me, personally, it is the lack of money, the worry, the lack of clients, the lack of other people in a position to buy my services who don’t consider what I have to offer, worth paying for—and the resultant poverty that this creates for me—coupled with the fact that now pay five times the purchase price of my piece of property in taxes every year and I can’t pay it and have money to eat and keep the utilities on at the same time—that constant pressure gets to one after 20 some odd years of struggling in a losing economic battle.
I for one, know that if I had money, and was able to earn it doing what I’m good at, I would feel efficacious, secure financially, and feel happiness. It’s the lacking of those things that for me, causes me severe strife, sleepless nights, etc. I’ll admit that I spend a substantial part of my waking day thinking about military countermeasures for when the SWAT teams come to evict us from our home. I find it easy to get ensnared in that depressing train of thought, as I’ve been doing it for the last 20 years, as I became personally in conflict with more and more unjust laws without the money to shield me from those laws’ harsh effects.
I keep reading self-help books, but it is all ‘feel good’ words—just words—and words alone don’t affect the way I feel or bring me to action.
Now I remember when I was young, and constantly mistreated in the most viscious manner by gangs of bullies. They’d never come one on one, it was always 12-15 other kids against one. But they’d taunt, and attack my self-image until I started to feel that not only that ugly face I saw in the mirror was my only problem, but that I was a loser on the whole.
Years later, I could not function socially in high school—I was the most unpopular kid in the whole school. In fact, I was unofficially voted “most likely to fail” (a parody on “Most like to succeed”, a category in our HS yearbook.) I remember the tortured years of seeing a girl with whom I would become infatuated to a point of becoming unable to think about anything else. And the big countdown would start, in which I’d go from enjoying the site of the girl whenever I caught a glimpse, to the thought that I need to approach that girl and tell her my feelings. Over a span of weeks, the urgency to approach the girl would intensify, as would my uneasiness. It became a very stressful situation, where my stomache would get all screwed up, my face would turn white, my hands would turn purple and stone cold, and I would be unable to speak without stuttering. But as I saw the opportunity’s window of availability slipping away, I would force myself to plan an interception and hope for a sympathetic response. But, in each of 105 instances throughout my teen and early adult years, the response was always one of disgust—I was always treated like a creature, not even a human being, and I would fall into intense despair and by the time I was 25, I believed that I would never find a woman, ever. In fact, I had some arranged dates that sent conflicting signals and almost drove me over the edge. I wound up as a bum for a number of years, unable to hold a job, deep in despair and shock from one particularly nasty instance where a ‘carrot’ was dangled before me long enough to rekindle long lost hopes that there was a chance for me, only to have it mysteriously yanked away, for no reason I could fathom at the time. I never held a good job after that. I got some stinking, godawful factory job that was so boring that my mind literally rotted away for the several years that I packed those items into boxes for 12-16 hours a day.
Then one day I retired. And I didn’t have enough money on a fixed income to keep up on the taxes on my otherwise paid-for home. But before things got really bad, I met my betrothed via the internet. Don’t ask me why, but this time, I knew it was for real, not just another cruel trick of fate. That was almost a decade ago. A few years ago, we had a child, despite the concerns that at advanced age, the parents often conceive autistic children. Fortunately, our daughter is normal. I was inclined to believe in miracles because of these two events.
And I would be happy today still, were it not for the fact that our home is about to be seized for back taxes. And with the exponential increases in the price of energy utilities, I can see that we would soon not be able to afford them either.
This late realization that I can’t beat the ‘system’ has put me on an emergency journey of self-discovery, as I seek to find out if there is a mental blockade between me and financial success. Why do I hate people? How can I stop hating people enough so that they don’t sense that I’m only out to get their money? How can I become a likeable person? How can I stop making enemies everywhere I go? Am I afraid of success? Is it the tax burdens and bookkeeping burdons that repell me from going all-out for success? These are just of few of the questions I am asking myself.
Depression, I believe, is rarely chemically-caused. Drugs treat symptoms. My mother was deeply depressed after Ayn Rand passed away. Within four years, she died, in a mental institution—her life had gone so quickly downhill. But the underlying reason was that my parents had severe money problems and they were getting old and had not achieved even a small fraction of their dreams. One could blame their physical illnesses, but one may also blame them for using those illnesses as crutches, or excuses for failing to achieve their goals. They both died in abject poverty, and horrible, painful deaths—mom, by choking on her own vomit in a mental institution because they had tied her up to a chair to force feed her, dad, of Leukemia in a hospital with cardiac arrest being the cause of death.
Success seems to come more easily for those who have a good head-start—ie., wealthy parents who put them through college. Sure, there are many who goof off and achieve only mediocre results, but there are the majority who enjoy good, middle income lifestyles. There are very few people who have that incredible power to rise above poverty though. Many of us who are born into it, die that way.
Depression comes from a desire to live dreams of a means beyond one’s reach. Happiness is a direct relationship between where one is today and where one expected to be today. If the two are at unity, one is content. If one’s situation is far worse than one expected to achieve by this stage of life, one is miserable. Ie., the waitress who believed that she should have been in a successful acting career by now.
One thing is for certain: the pharmaceutical industry is making a lot of money off miserable and sick people. There is financial motivation to keep people on drugs. Unless drugs caused your depression, drugs can’t fix your depression.
