i have been very depressed three or four times. always it was the same cause. i’ve never had the experience of being depressed for no reason. i’ve never gone to bed feeling fine and woke up feeling depressed.
i think i’ve acquired enough sophistication to say:
i can’t imagine anyone under the same circumstances not becoming very depressed, crying constantly, hating himself, thinking of killing himself.
i also think the circumstances are new to human experience. that is, in the past my guess is such circumstances were very uncommon.
what were they every single time:
a beautiful girl or woman who was unavailable. but not because i was ugly or boring or whatever.
because of my family background.
i live in the us. despite college entrance exams above the mean for admits to all of america’s best universities. despite the same for its graduate school entrance exams, i never had a chance of getting in. my parents divorced. my dad hit me, fornicated, was a loser.
and so am i. social reproduction is reason enough to top yourself.
the pills didn’t work. the psychiatrists and therapists were idiots.
my solution has been alcohol.
i’m in the following study believe it or not https://www.cog-genomics.org/.
but i have no prospects and never will.
anyway, blah, blah, blah…
it is a fundamental tenet of the american ideology, so to say, that the locus of pathology is the individual, never his society and never the two together.
A Reader