On Mental Health

In short, our current iteration of society and the day-to-day lives it entails can be very difficult! Sometimes you don't have enough money, sometimes you don't have enough time, sometimes you have approximately 20 things going wrong at the same time and you don't have anyone to turn to because everyone else is going through their own stuff too.

Your mental health may be suffering, but it doesn't mean it's your fault if you feel bad. If your life (ie. nature) has put you into difficult circumstances, it can be natural to feel fear or anxiety or depression ...

Someone who's been through war will often experience PTSD. That makes sense, their brains and bodies have experienced things that most humans don't, and their brain responds in natural (but unfortunate) ways to the devastating conditions they witness and harrowing experiences they face.

Someone who's lived with an abusive partner or family member may be hyper-aware of their circumstances, anxious because of defensive instincts built around their own protection.

Anyone who has to sell their body, mind, thought, and time in order to have a salary to survive, well, you have reason to feel like you don't have control over your full life. Work is necessary for things to keep functioning, I want a fruitful society that employs its people in useful and productive labor. But right now, I see a whole lotta people stressed about bills and tired of long hours, their bodies and brains are getting tired. And that makes sense, their brains are responding to circumstances pretty naturally if they don't feel so great about working for pennies on the dollar compared to the guys at the top, wasting billions on a whim.

If I can convey anything to you, it's that your brain is responding naturally. If it's responding in bad ways, that doesn't (necessarily) mean anything is wrong with you or your brain - it just means your situations, circumstances, and experiences have led your brain to work this way. The way you've been treated, the interactions you've had, the media you've consumed - those all shape how you think, how you act, who you are.

I'm not going to give you any of the conventional mental health advice you hear. "Exercise", "make friends", "talk to someone", "clean your room", "pick up a hobby", "do something new"

Why thank you so much, I'm cured now!

I know. I know. I've been there. All that stuff does help, obviously, but you already know that. It's still hard to do.

My advice is to trust your brain. Use it to understand why it works the way it does, and use that to help you move in the direction you want to. Stay healthy, friends.

Podcasts

It's Not Just In Your Head

I'm not a huge podcast guy, my brain isn't wired that way, but I have tuned in to It's Not Just In Your Head (via anchor.fm) (Patreon). Maybe this piques your fancy:

Two mental health professionals explore how our capitalist economic system impacts our emotional lives. From precarious housing and employment, to unaffordable healthcare, to endless debt -- it's not just in your head!

Tweets

Zo - I wanna say 2020ish, but I can't pull the og.

This tweet lives in my brain, it's one of the greats. It's from zophia. Her twitter is private at @allegedlyzo (previously @gramscifancam), but here's here goodreads.

the human body evolved over hundreds of thousands of years so u can sit at a desk in a sterile cubicle and look at fake lights in a box and pretend u dont want to kill urself and if u can't focus on doing that for 9 hours a day 5 days a week that's a mental disorder

Nov 14, 2022 (src)

Repeating the correct line of a locked mutual: we should oppose the current psychiatric establishment not because mental illness is fake (it's not) but because they only care about us for our ability to produce labor

They're mechanics, and like mechanics they can help us - but their criteria for help is wrong and they are willing to break and mutilate us so we conform to the labor regime

Nov 14, 2022 (src)

We can make systemic critiques of therapy as class warfare, the colonial and carceral nature of psychology, and essentialist theories of mental health without condemning the individual use of therapy and medication to function

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