Todd Suomela's Library tagged depression →  View Popular, Search in Google

"We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives."

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"Fearful and flattened. That’s what our industrial growth culture wants and needs of its members, now that it is a global monoculture strained to its absolute limits. Unless exercised in a culturally-approved way (such as “competitive” sports, wars, or abuse of one’s work or social “subordinates”), or locked away behind closed doors where there is plausible deniability, anger is now met with quick and violent suppression. Peaceful but angry demonstrations are met with heavily-armed stormtroopers. Anyone who even discusses angry resistance to the ecological desolation of our planet, to the theft and pillaging of Earth’s resources for the benefit of a tiny rapacious 1%, or to wars over oil or ideology, is branded a “terrorist” and subject to “disappearance”, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons, and/or indefinite imprisonment.

Likewise, feelings of debilitating grief, which I think are perfectly normal in our terrible world, have been pathologized and are now treated with large doses of anti-depressants or, failing that, ostracism and/or incarceration or other institutionalization. Our industrial culture teaches us to self-victimize. We are to blame, we are told, for our own unemployment and poverty (due to personal laziness or lack of moral fibre). We are to blame, too, for our own chronic illnesses (due to our poor eating and exercising habits). Suicide is, of course, treated not only as a sign of irresponsibility, but as a crime."

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We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.

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"There's a glum desperation in the air that's hard to escape: volatility, futility, and a McFuture ghoulishly wagging its skeletal finger at a lost generation."

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Cognitive inflexibility may play an important role in rumination, a risk factor for the onset and maintenance of depressive episodes. In the study reported here, we assessed participants’ ability to either reverse or maintain in working memory the order of three emotion or three neutral words. Differences (or sorting costs) between response latencies in backward trials, on which participants were asked to reverse the order of the words, and forward trials, on which participants were asked to remember the words in the order in which they were presented, were calculated. Compared with control participants, depressed participants had higher sorting costs, particularly when presented with negative words. It is important to note that rumination predicted sorting costs for negative words but not for positive or neutral words in the depressed group. These findings indicate that depression and rumination are associated with deficits in cognitive control.

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Often cited comparisons – which look only at the US – find that today’s crisis is milder than the Great Depression. In this column, two leading economic historians show that the world economy is now plummeting in a Great-Depression-like manner. Indeed, world industrial production, trade, and stock markets are diving faster now than during 1929-30. Fortunately, the policy response to date is much better.

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in list: Economic Crisis

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in list: Economic Crisis

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For the last month, I have been gripped by the gnawing sensation that all of the conventional wisdom about our current economic crisis is wrong. I think we are facing a crisis of capitalism, not just a periodic bout of market failure.

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in list: Economic Crisis

Depressions are a natural feature of a much bigger cycle. A part of capitalism that people love to talk about when the going is good…but despise when it turns against them. We’re talking about what Schumpeter describes as “creative destruction.” Everyone loved “creative destruction” in the late ’90s – when they thought it added to their balance sheets. Now, they beg government to save them from it.

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in list: Economic Crisis

Which brings me to the purpose of this week's rant. I am watching Saturday Night Live and the Abilify commercial comes on and I say Hmmm, that is interesting, Abilify isn't really a product for the masses...well, not yet. People experiencing episodes of psychosis are really a niche market in your humble narrators opinion. So I listen just a bit more closely. The ad tells me that if I am depressed, taking an antidepressant and am still feeling depressed, well then what I need is a heavy duty antipsychotic tranquilizer to shake me out of my doldrums. What the Fuck! These drugs are at their chemical base neurotoxins, like the fleaspray you put on your dog, only you are smart enough not to swallow that or allow your dog to swallow it. All of the antipsychotic medications are ultimately similar chemical derivatives of the granddaddy of them all thorazine. Thorazine has been used throughout history for many things. Why in this country in the 1930s the Department of Agriculture was distributing it to farmers to kill parasites on and in their pigs. The drug companies will tell you that the new "atypical" antipsychotics have fewer side effects and are less toxic. Two words-bull shit.

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The report found that among small businesses "no "credit crunch" has appeared to date beyond the normal cyclical tightening of credit." The NFIB found that worries about interest rates and financing were a concern to only 3% of respondents...By and large, the story of the NFIB report was that if credit is going untapped, it's largely because company operators are not choosing to pursue the credit. It's not that companies can't get the extra money, it's that they don't want or need it because of the broader slowdown in economic activity.

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in list: Economic Crisis

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in list: Economic Crisis

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