Just Don’t Say You’re Depressed

Also, have your climate elevator speech prepared for the urologist

Shh. Remember, we’re always happy in America. And have a nice day! Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik.

A friend of mine on Mastodon read this article and shared a couple of links for those of us struggling with climate anxiety. I’d like to share them with you, too. From The Conversation on managing eco-anxiety, and Health Central on the same.

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Recently, I’ve noticed trips to my physician involve questions about depression. They’re on the forms I fill out in the waiting room and a question I’m asked during physicals as I obediently take deep breaths and gently exhale. I suspect this is a result of the spike in depression we experienced during the Covid lockdown. I don’t recall questions about my mental state being part of physicals before. Am I wrong? What’s your experience?

There’s good reason for these questions. Suicides are on the rise in the America. According to the CDC, over 49,000 people took their lives in 2022, one person every eleven minutes. Suicide rates increased a stunning 37 percent between 2000-2018, decreased 5 percent between 2018-2020, but, returned to their peak again in 2022. The group with the highest rates were non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaska Native, 27.1 per 100,000 people, followed by non-Hispanic White, 17.6 per 100,000. I’m certain every demographic has both particular and common reasons for these tragic deaths, but when I think of Alaskan Native Americans, and Native Americans in general, whose ancestors not so long ago endured genocide, were shunted off to reservations, forced into schools to be assimilated, their cultures destroyed, that despair seems little wonder. Wild, beautiful, vast Alaska a refuge where it has been possible for them to practice their direct way of living is melting, destroying villages, fishing and game. I find little wonder their suicide rates are so high.

Starkly rising suicide rates since 2000

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Suicide rates by ethnicity

I’m fine with being asked about depression, certainly it’s appropriate for our primary care physicians to ask about our mental state. However, I doubt it’s particularly effective, as our shallow, fractured, consumption and entertainment culture demands we pretend to be happy. How many answer these questions honestly? I imagine some people get help as a result, but one condition that can’t be treated is reality.

Sorry, I’m going to rant now.

Reality is, neoliberal economics giving rise to oligarchs running amuck, and never seen before wealth disparity. Reality is, wages not keeping up for decades. Reality is, working hard isn’t enough for most of us. Reality is, the military industrial complex in America is nearly a one trillion dollar monster. Reality is, we sell 41.7 percent of the world’s weapons. Reality is, our media calls Gaza a war, not a monstrous one-sided slaughter of children and unarmed civilians. Reality is, students calling out genocide are censured and attacked by police as the oligarchs, the money behind our colleges and universities, call for suppression. Reality is the Amazon Rainforest flipping to a carbon emitter, not a sink. Reality is the Arctic, Siberia and Greenland ice sheet melting. Reality is the ocean acidifying from absorbing carbon dioxide and coral reefs bleaching. Reality is, our children are getting shot dead in school. Reality is, I hardly see an insect anymore. Reality is, monkeys are falling out of trees dead from heat before they hit the ground. Reality is sea lions, dolphins and whales beaching themselves in desperation from hot oceans and diseases caused by those conditions. Reality is people are dying from wet bulb temperature and psychopaths like Greg Abbott legislating laws against mandatory heat and water breaks for outdoor workers. Reality is our country has become so stupid and corrupt as to have a four time bankrupt, serial liar, sex abuser, racist, insurrection inciting, ignoramus, lunatic still in play for the presidency.

Free speech being exercised at the University of Texas, Austin. This is what calling out genocide looks like in America. Photo: Manoo Sirivelu | The Daily Texan

Our drift and suppression further and further from reality is a profound issue. We no longer live in a manageable world. Technology and changes we don’t ask for are rammed down our throats ever faster and called progress when in reality they’re harm, AI being the latest example. Clinical questions about depression annoy me. I’m not ill, society is. A degree of depression is one of the correct responses. When will we recognize individuals are the victims of a foundational problem, that of out of control contemporary life and human injustice being the cause? I’m not holding my breath.

I never answer the depression questions honestly. Living in reality is not a treatable condition, it’s one you can only learn to live with. Contemporary western medicine for the most part treats symptoms, not underlying conditions. Sure, my primary care could recommend a therapist for the grayness I feel on some days from endless gray pavement, impoverished neighborhoods that never improve, abandoned industrial decay and the disappearance of bird song, but I reject that. I don’t have the problem, society does.

Choosing to live with our eyes open, seeing clearly through the matrix, being bored by inane entertainment culture, and feeling disgust for a disingenuous media that feeds us half-truths at best, I find deeply alienating. There are no pills or counselors that can fix that, and I don’t care to be numbed to reality. Our culture is ill. Our leadership is ill. That’s why our beautiful planet is burning with fever, irrefutable physical evidence of our psychosis.

No one in my immediate life will converse about climate change, the Sixth Extinction, consider boycotting unnecessary consumption or eliminating red meat in their diets as the biggest agricultural contributor to our ever hotter planet. We’ve known that about beef for a very long time. This article from Scientific American refers to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report that dates to 2006. In it, they state:

It turns out that producing half a pound of hamburger for someone's lunch a patty of meat the size of two decks of cards releases as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as driving a 3,000-pound car nearly 10 miles.

They won’t read my work, they would rather chit-chat about trivialities. They feel helpless to change anything, so they don’t try. They consider my work to be pointless. However, the only thing more pointless than fighting for a nearly lost caused, is not fighting for one. Not acting guarantees a poor result. I don’t consider myself a doomer for trying. I consider them doomers for not.

I’m not angry about this anymore (I was at the beginning). When I started this work three years ago, I felt much the same as they do, helpless, and unfortunately the thousands of articles and papers I’ve read have revealed no magic solutions. I didn’t expect them to. But I feel it’s important and healthy to fight, and that the only way to have a legitimate opinion is to educate oneself.

It’s possible they fail to grasp just how bad our circumstances will become without radical changes, or maybe they would be fighting right now, but climate change and species extinction are sneaky things we’re not built to respond to. Our fight or flight instincts only arise in the face of immediate perceived threat.

Living in the northeast US, I have been spared the horrors of daily life-threatening temperatures and massive wildfires (although I have breathed their acrid smoke from California and Canada). Some years ago my sister sent a video before I moved back to Buffalo of a major thoroughfare, Niagara Falls Boulevard running like rapids on the Colorado River, so flooding from Lake Erie is a potential issue.

Bottom line, no one will be left untouched by climate change as mass migration, reduced agriculture yields, broken supply chains and endemic inflation manifest. If my circle of friends and family made a plan, we could build resiliency together, but they’re in the denial. By the time they wake up, it will be too late to effectively pool our resources and knowledge.

It’s disappointing, if not surprising, how many are unable to grasp our circumstances or how bad they will become if we don’t radically change course. Recently, a comment on one of my articles was to the effect of:

“All you doomers are the same, why don’t you take a walk and get some fresh air.”

Was he suggesting a whiff of California wildfires? I understood the comment which I cleaned up, but we doomers aren’t doomers, we’re sentinels calling out the truth trying to wake everyone up who has been absorbed by the fallacious circus we live in. Inaction and denial are doom.

Rather than argue, I deleted the comment and blocked this bonehead. I realize my writing isn’t for everyone, If it was, I would be doing something wrong. I don’t need such a person polluting our space. I hope his walk does him good. I have no hard feelings. We all need to find our path.

I hope I am creating a bit of a community that we may not have in our immediate lives. I think that’s worth something regardless of the outcome of our crises. I know it helps me. Let’s finish on a lighter note.

Back to the medical community. Getting a bit older, I have a few health issues that have crept up, so I now have a urologist, neurologist and rheumatologist I visit, oh joy. In the case of the urologist, I never have any idea who I’m going to see, it’s someone brand new every time getting overly personal with me. I’m used to this indignity now, whatever, but on my last visit I got even. Yet another stranger was probing my nether regions and asked me what I do while he did so. I suppose he was using his office manner to put me at ease, the dork. I’m hardly in the mood for conversation while this humiliation is being performed, but I’m used to it now, so answered calmly without squeaking at all. I told him I’m a writer, primarily about climate change.

I didn’t mean to, I didn’t even know I had one in me, but I gave him my elevator speech on the subject, starting with Exxon’s cover-up of knowing precisely what burning fossil fuels and global warming would look like today. I ranted about the Kyoto treaty and think I finished with something about massive impending crop failures. The poor guy couldn’t back the door fast enough as I finished. Ah, sweet vengeance.

Let’s get Harris-Walz elected, then be prepared to hold their feet to the fire. I am skeptical they understand the immediacy or dire nature of our situation. If Harris appoints a climate scientist to her cabinet, that would give me a glimmer of hope. They're going to need encouragement to take the long view and risk their political careers with tough, unpopular decisions. They’re also going to have to circumvent the overturning of the Chevron doctrine, which threatens to tie every detail of legislature up in red tape. We must minimize the cascading effects from climate change. Fossil fuel projects must be halted as well as billions of dollars of money going to the oil industry for bogus carbon capture projects. As always, thank you for reading.