[Serious] The Mental Health Crisis

[Belacqua]

may even play a positive role in productivity.

Yes, I think this is all well documented. Since the Reagan/Clinton administration, productivity has increased dramatically, but the people doing the work don't see the benefits of that. It all goes to the top. The whole thing has been structured for exploitation, and it gets worse every year. Society could be just as productive, economy-wise, as it is now with far less cruelty. But that would mean that Bezos wouldn't get his spaceship, for example. 

I know what would free me from my melancholy. Education. (Quality education, anyway.) One day that will be freely available to all, I think. But society needs to get its priorities straight. If each member playing his or her proper role is how we define justice, then we need to ensure each member is healthy and happy so that they may play that role to their fullest.

Strangely, when Americans talk about health insurance, they will compare themselves to the British or Canadian models, but never mention Japan. I think this is because Japan's system works so well that the corporate media are afraid to mention it.


After the war, when they needed to rebuild the economy from scratch, they knew that to get things up and running they needed the maximum number of healthy people with sufficient incomes not only to produce but to buy stuff. So they set up government-run single payer health insurance, and employed more people than they strictly needed, and focused on public education. It's actually good for the economy to have more people healthy and fulfilled, but, again, the US has chosen cruelty. 

And of course life isn't about the economy. Any sane society will set itself up for maximum human flourishing. 

where entire groups of people are "in on" using an abusing one individual.

It's not the only cause of depression of course, but the amount of unnecessary, even casual cruelty in society constantly amazes me. There will be groups that choose a person to pick on, as you point out. And there will be whole social categories that serve that function for other large groups. 

I have never been able to understand the great pleasure that people apparently feel in being cruel. In going far over and beyond the amount of attack that is necessary. 

Part of this, I think, is the American tradition of Clint Eastwood -- the self-assigned role of moral arbiter. Once a person judges, by his own standards, that someone has fallen below a certain standard, it is our right and duty to make that person suffer. You often hear a vile justification, when people say something like "I treat everybody with respect, but if you treat me like shit then I'll give it right back." It means that we can easily, always, find a justification to treat people badly. On this forum, too, verbally. 

(I've never heard this justification expressed in Japan, but probably I would if I hung out with Yakuza.) 

I agree with you that depression must have many causes. And the cases spread, I think.

There's a lovely image in Dante, where he talks about the pleasure of being good to others. He likens the good shining out of God (as the Form of the Good) to light from the sun. (This is a common Neoplatonic trope.) All the light is from one source, but each of us is a mirror, and the more we reflect of this goodness, the brighter the whole world is. So you can imagine all the mirrors, mutually reflecting, brightening the world for everyone. But the world we live in is somehow more like the opposite, with darkness spread and reflected.