Oncle

Before we start: I am not a doctor or a psychologist. I make bold claims here left and right. Keep this in mind Before we start 2: I'm doing pretty good right now, despite how this article may come across. It's been a lot, but I've been doing a lot of processing things and I think it's paid off. This article is just a part of me organizing my thoughts and doing more of just that: processing things.

The Sad and The Depressed

One of my favourite days of the week right now is Sunday. I usually see someone, often Elisa, in the mornings, I head to practice, and then I go out for dinner with some teammates afterward. Three social events in the span of a day, interesting and delicious food twice, and some social exercise. It has everything I want in a day. This is great for me because this summer was not the summer for your Oncle Spenny.

My last year of uni was great, I had really found a role. Despite not everything being perfect, there were no major negative afflictions, which is the state in which I had spent many of my uni years. I am always suspicious of good times because I know my luck, but my luck had been holding, right up until the last week.

The Sad

note: this is a trauma dump. If you don't want all the personal stuff, you can just read the last little paragraph at the end of this section and work from there

I remember calling my dad and being happy to chat with him for a few days in a row. I was getting advice since I had forgotten my bag somewhere stupidly and gotten all my stuff stolen. A couple days later, I got a call from my mom saying that he had collapsed and I had to rush home. He had an incurable late-stage brain cancer which had already taken over more than half of his brain. On top of this, he was our family's breadwinner. Our relationship was complicated, but we were on OK terms, which I had worked hard to maintain. Not only was I losing him, I had to figure out more of the real world and fast, with no post-university buffer.

I remember being outside of an Allwyn's with my mom soon after and getting a phone call. It was my girlfriend at the time. She had separation anxiety and was worried about not being able to see me enough while I was working out the above situation with my dad. I went to Kingston to see everyone and show it would be OK, and she broke up with me. She later apologized, explained that it was an anxiety from separation anxiety, and tried to work things out, but my trust was shattered, and I decided not to go back. Essentially, the relationship ended by accident on the worst possible terms.

My dad took the most complicated way out, surviving being taken off life support for a few days and just keeping on waking up for yet one more cigarette until he didn't. There were many ups and downs in the process. The summer then went on with a vacation to the east coast which was amazing, but I soon returned home I spent the next months working, trying to figure out my role and trying to figure out my new home back at home living in Toronto again. It was a big change from Kingston, a smaller town which I had grown to love. Distances were now farther and I had to drive constantly, which brought its own crisis in not knowing how to navigate properly anymore.

Over the next months, my ex had reached out to me multiple times in her mental health crises and we had talked a few times. It was clearly not what it once was, not even close, but I figured we had things on a functional level. We had practices where we were fine around each other. Eventually, with the help of an injury, my physical health also stuttered. With it, my mental crises weighed on me and my mind shattered. It was now me who needed help. At just past 1 am I reached out to some friends, who didn't reply as they were sleeping, then not knowing where to turn I contacted my ex for help. She used the words of my cry for help and reflected them back to turn me away. To anyone reading, never do this. I have never regretted being there to help people, and now I know just how much worse not helping someone can make things. This botched response made my crisis significantly worse.

Luckily, Elisa got back to me soon after and helped me, and I had another teammate reach back once I was on the phone too. I talked to my teammate at a later date and both friends were an immense help. From here, Elisa and I embarked on a project that I will credit for helping me out of the depths of this mess: project friendsmaxxing. See friends as often as possible and make it work at all costs. It was awesome, and while we are in a different phase of the project now, it served as the groundwork for getting all the friends together and continues in spirit.

That's to say that I did get help and it was helpful, but stemming from that initial mishandling of my crisis were more crises. I dropped a semester to be with my sister when she was hospitalized years back, and it turns out that changed a lot behind the scenes. That dropped semester ensured that I would not get any awards or recognition from Queen's for the rest of my time there. Unfortunately, I cannot go into specifics, but this made me feel betrayed as well. I spent much time reassuring and convincing myself that I wasn't being sabotaged somewhere, but I effectively was.

One award that I had aimed for was the Boat Award, named after my friend and teammate Boat who unfortunately took her own life in my time on the team. At the time, I was going through a bad time myself, and despite thinking she didn't like me, she was always there for me. It was profoundly confusing to realize that it was she who wouldn't make it. At her funeral, I spoke because I felt compelled to, and I made a promise to make sure that no one around me would go without mental health help, and I would always be there for everyone. I did well in this regard. I never won that award, which I don't need, but I would have liked it.

The one who did win the award that year was the person who turned me away when I needed help. This situation seriously harmed my relationship with Boat. Reconciling my relationship with Boat has been profoundly difficult. Someone did go without help, so I feel like I failed my promise to her. I did so well for so many, but I feel like I didn't do enough. I never got that boat award, so I feel like I didn't live up to her. I know I could have gotten the award if not for that one semester, so I feel like I did at the same time. A confusing relationship with someone no longer with us is no simple task. My relationship with my father is similar in that regard.

Reconciling my relationship with my previous team has also been profoundly difficult. I want to be there and I want to root for all my friends, but I can't be there for the sake of my own mental health. I don't know how to face the person who abandoned me in my time of need, then again during a mental health crisis. I don't want the person who abandoned me to win, especially the first year after I am gone. I do want the team to win. It is a painful spot to be in. So far, I haven't fully managed to reconcile either of these relationships.

After all of this, taking a while to slowly get back on my feet, I learned that my friend and capstone project partner didn't make it after a car crash. He was 22, around the time when I consider myself as really starting to hit my full stride. The same age boat was.

All of this has been a lot to handle, especially at once. There are several major crises I am facing. I am sad, and I have been profoundly sad and anxious for a while, but at least right now, I don't think I am depressed. At least since the onset of operation friendsmaxxing.

The Depressed

I was out for a Sunday dinner with some friends from the team, and one of my teammates said that everything seemed to be going really well, but she was sad, and that made her feel guilty, especially around people who had been through a lot of specific things. She was not able to point out any specific affliction causing her feeling of dejection, but it was there all the same.

I don't think she is sad, but I do think she may be depressed.

I am not her and I cannot read her mind. I do not have complete information and details of her life which I can point out. I also want to clarify that compared to mine I do not want to diminish her experience. The opposite. I am going through a hard time, she is going through a hard time. We are both in a struggle to improve. This essay explores some of my perceived differences in these conditions in the hope that it helps.

Sadness and Depression

Sadness and depression are linked. Many think that prolonged sadness is depression. I don't think so. I think that while the feeling may present fairly similarly, being a general somber negative emotion, the mechanisms in how they work are distinct. Not only do I think it matters, but I think that especially in the current world, it is a critical distinction to make. I believe sadness and depression are completely different, and recognition of the difference may be a game-changer for people who suffer as they may be able to better understand it.

The Cause of Sadness

Sadness is inflicted upon someone. It is an acute event or condition that causes a person to feel a grievance, which feels like sadness. It follows an immunological response: when the body has the flu, your body raises its temperature to try to stop the virus from multiplying. This rise in temperature is a fever, and it feels awful. When you go through a grievance, your mind produces a sadness to help you process the grievance, and it feels awful.

This puts the grievance in the state of being the other (akin to the flu virus), and the sadness as the reaction to the other (akin to the fever). When a flu virus is introduced to you, your body works to other it again by expunging it, ensuring that it is othered again. Sadness similarly works as a method to other one's grievances. An affliction rises in the present and acts as a negative on the mental, and the mind produces sadness to process it and expunge it into the past.

In the case of loss, such as a loved one, they become memories. You may be reminded of them in the present, but their presence is pushed to the past. The moments in the present where you engage with them and realize they are not there fade. In the case of ailments, such as career-ending injuries, the ailment cannot be expunged, so instead the mental expunges the identity associated with what the ailment prevents to the past, forcing the person to create a new identity to bring into the future. An athlete may no longer be that athlete, they are something else now but used to be that athlete.

I also have categorized traumas under sadness, which may be controversial. I believe that permanent traumas are the equivalent of a fever so bad it causes permanent damage or death. Trauma is a sadness so bad that it either inflicts a permanent mental scar or in the case of debilitating traumas such as PTSD, the reaction kills the present instead of the past in its reaction against the affliction. Instead of a person leaving a major affliction behind, they are unable to live completely in the present, a part of them becomeing stuck in that past.

The Cause of Depression

Where sadness works with the immunization model, an affliction with a purge, depression instead works with a fatigue model. You cannot sleep off the flu, your body must expunge it (you sleep to recover the toll taken from this process). Alternatively, your body cannot simply expunge fatigue, you must sleep to recover it (and your body may expunge ideal function until you do to encourage sleep). Depression is caused by exhaustion from coping with a world that is not designed to accommodate your humanity.

Many say that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. I think this is not true, or at least, the wording may be misleading. I believe that a chemical imbalance may continue a depression longer than it should exist, but the initial cause of the depression is generally not a chemical imbalance. Either the depression causes the chemical imbalance, or something causes the chemical imbalance that causes the depression. The chemical imbalance does not spawn from nowhere. Whether it is a chemical imbalance or not, I believe it is initially caused by this fatigue.

Fatigue does not arise from a specific condition. It arrives through wider processes of living, and if the fatigue is not addressed, results in exhaustion, or at worst, burnout. If not created by an affliction, however, how do we know what processes of living afflict the exhaustion? Simply put, it is more long-standing life circumstances than any one specific thing, and a combination of many processes and non-human oriented circumstances can, in conjunction, slowly cause wear on the psyche that results in exhaustion and burnout. These conditions are generally not personal, but rather impersonal, external, and political. They do not afflict a person, but people. They do not come from your relationships but from a lack of them. It does not come from nothing but is systemically created.

One of the first and most predictable systemically created causes of depression is alienation from labour. What are seen as high-skill and desirable jobs are technologically advanced, and generally involve high mental expenditure put into a computer as the machine used to process the labour. Nothing comes from the machine, the results of the process are simply sent away. On top of that, a product is rarely finished, and the result of the labour is often intangible or not even recognizable. To further this, technological surveillance, optimization, and the decline of unions have made people further squeezed to perform tasks like a robot instead of a human. This is beneficial to profits, but extremely detrimental to the well-being of the people being squeezed.

To add to this, our free time is spent working more than ever. Even beyond side hustles (read as having multiple jobs), people are now addicted to performing free labour. Social media platforms gain their value from having more users and monopolizing people's attention. To contribute to these platforms and engage on them is to perform labour for them. We spend all day labouring just to return home and continue to labour for free under a different labouring structure. We are addicted to work that we have no control over, and given that much of it is for free, the compensation we have is abysmal. Even under the industrial capitalists who abused their workers to the extreme, at least the workers had some time that was truly theirs. That time is now capitalized on with unpaid labour delivered to us through smart devices. The ability to be free from labour is no longer respected as a core of our humanity.

We also now have to be much more creative with how we interact with work as a whole. Previous generations were broadly able to be successful while just being told what to do. You could get a job. In the Keynesian era, there was practically 0% unemployment with an extremely robust social welfare safety net. In the competing Soviet Union, there was a job guarantee. You could work at a company, get raises or promotions, and then generally retire off of that. Now, it is nearly impossible to afford a home in much of the world. Where previously a single income from a mailman could raise a family, now, a job and a side hustle may not be able to afford a decent place to live at all. Generationally, this is not understood, which leads to a wider political confusion about living standards. They were supposed to always go up over time, but that isn't the experience of many young people nowadays.

Another aspect is structural loneliness. The isolation in the workplace is not the extent of it. Many neighbourhoods were deliberately built to be as isolating as possible. Suburbs were designed with keeping people out in mind. They also enforced more space between houses. We have a lot of data that people quote about how many people in their neighbourhood someone is able to remember. Those who live in towns are able to remember and know several times more people than those in suburbs. Those in the suburbs may even say they have not talked to anyone in their neighbourhood in years. n top of this, cars are a travel medium that promotes isolation from spontaneous encounters with people. Technology like earbuds also provide constant stimulus and prevent anyone from talking to others randomly. It is often even considered rude to try to do so at all.

On the line of stimulus, social media and other technological innovations have led us blindly into a world of constant overwhelming stimulus. Distraction can help delay sadness, but feeds into depression. We constantly consume content, often from multiple sources at the same time, and deprivation from that content is considered weird. Even internally within these forms of constant stimulus, the rate of stimulus is increasing. What was once scrolling text posts from friends turned to more global posts based on topics, which has now turned to short-form content: exposure to global algorithm shovel-fed videos, each designed to grab as much attention as possible. This over-stimulus makes the real world, the physical world we live in, extremely boring by comparison. We become isolated from reality.

For those who go out to search for answers, there is also a broader confusion about the world. When they search, they find liberal history misleading, but the newfound discoveries are hard to communicate, especially without being a buzzkill. People complain about capitalism, but liberalization seemed to do a lot of good historically, raising people out of poverty. People complain about neoliberalism, but the economists say this is the best way. Are we in the neoliberal era or the techno-feudal era? Will the solutions proposed make things way worse if that is answered incorrectly how do we know? There are so many things to look into and so many fields to explore, where does one go to find more? There are many conflicting answers, which ones are actually correct or at least on to something? It is extremely confusing, overwhelming, and exhausting. Even just looking at any one structure of finance is often so complicated and convoluted that the most knowledgeable don't really know what they're doing.

When the mental labour of existing becomes taxing, we submit to exhaustion. When the work is too much, we burn out and are given no time to recover. It is under these conditions that depression takes over, and now you can see why it cannot be expunged. to expunge it would be far greater than to handle our own emotions, to handle our emotions without changing these circumstances would simply lead to a greater ability to be exploited, which would lead to further burnout. That is, if you find a way to cope, it will only free you up to expose you to more of the aforementioned.

If it cannot be expunged under the immunization model, the exhaustion model implies that it needs to be rested. This does not mean rest as in sleeping but rather a freedom to get away from exploitation and bombardment of our senses through spaces like social media. It may mean complete rest from these, or it may mean use in a healthy moderation. This rest would require freedom from work, exploitation, and the speed of stimulus. This is extremely hard to achieve, as there are a lot of resources spent trying to make it as addicting as possible to succumb under these circumstances to more media consumption. This is why depression is so common right now.

Crisis!

I believe that crises come at an intersection of sadness and depression.

Depression, being an exhaustion, creates an apathy. It resists strong emotion. Depression is not a wrath or hatred, but a wider indifference and warped reality that loses its sense of joy and whimsicality. It is the dulling of intensity, and crisis spawns from intensity. Sadness on the other hand is a process that can be incredibly intense, but can usually be handled in a favorable and human environment. People have struggled with sadness forever, but through strong human connections, the emotions would be processed.

When a person goes through an overwhelming sadness without the wider environment that supports their humanity, we arrive at a crisis. The lowest of the low. It is here where the strong negative emotions of sadness are able to combine with the negative emotions of depression to send someone to rock bottom. If depression is a long-term steady signal, and sadness is more volatile, both being at their lowest sends the overall mental into a negative spiral, straight down with no immediate trusted and safe network to stop it.

Aside: Everyone should have a plan written down somewhere for what to do in a crisis. In these lows, the brain is beyond logic. Writing can help organize your brain, and maybe it can help you if you're unfortunate enough to come across a crisis.

Analysis and Solutions

These are methods I used after my crisis on my journey to becoming better. All of them were and still are useful to me, and I will continue with them. I recommend if you are facing something you look into what may be useful to you.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

I believe cognitive behavioural therapy is best targeted at solving issues of sadness. This is not to say that it cannot help with depression, but I believe sadness is its most precise target. It is based on finding specific grievances then helping you process the emotions, and helping you improve your interactions with those specific grievances. I spent some time on a cognitive behavioural therapy workbook after my crisis, and it helped me immensely. I was able to take the complex mountain of issues I was facing, organize them in my mind, and recognize the emotions that I was struggling with. The workbook, Mind Over Mood, was an indispensable tool for attacking my complex sadness, and I would recommend it to anyone.

But why do I think it targets sadness more than depression? I believe cognitive behavioural therapy targets specific grievances for an individual to help them process it. As sadness needs to be expunged into the past, it can help in the processing of the sadness, akin to how medicine may be able to help treat sicknesses. The focus is on what is happening to a person and helping them overcome it, helping them move forward. Facing fears, learning strategies to relax, and organizing to process emotion is incredibly useful, but under my model depression does not need to be expunged. It needs to be rested.

Cognitive behavioural therapy can help with this resting process, but I believe it to be more of a by-product of the process rather than the express goal worked towards. Time spent processing emotions in a workbook before bed is time spent achieving your own labour on your own terms, for you and not for anyone else. It is quiet, relaxing, and mentally calming without additional stimulus. Time spent talking to a therapist is similar, and also social. It will engage in this rest and will help, but these instances of rest are temporary while you are engaged in that process. To be sustainable, the immediate rest needs to be used to make other changes to sustain the rest outside of these temporary outlets.

Psychoanalysis

I believe that psychoanalysis is best targeted at solving issues of depression. If depression requires rest from living under circumstances not designed to accommodate humanity, psychoanalysis helps us understand the basic conditions of human living. It gives us insight into the core of human behaviour and allows us methods of understanding the systems we interact with. It can identify the wider plights of humanity, which allows us to learn how to rest from them. It is not rest in itself, though the reading may be restful, but it can help us learn how to rest and what we need to rest from.

It may also be the case that someone's life seems to be going well with no identifiable plight. In this case, anti-depressants may be an indispensable tool in improving their conditions. It may be that an initial change in the depression or anxiety alone is enough to break out of the negativity and start an upward trend.

Where psychoanalysis suffers is that this overthinking of everything and understanding of the plights of humanity can be stressful. It can become a specific affliction to a person, its own sadness. Not only that, but it can be complicated and obtuse at best, which leaves a lot of interpretation for many topics you try to analyze. At that, it is extremely fun if done correctly and with friends, which I would recommend any day.

Anti-Depressants

After my crisis, I started taking a low dose of anti-depressants and have found it useful. I believe that anti-depressants have a role in some cases. Anti-depressants will not solve the problem, but can provide the necessary cover which allows someone to make necessary changes. If one is exhausted or anxious, it is incredibly hard to get out and do things that will provide cognitive rest, such as getting out to see a friend. Anti-depressants can help boost a person to the point where they can do this. They allow people to get out of bed, do laundry, and all those Sisyphean tasks which exist in such a constant cycle that they can overwhelm constantly.

I think it is dangerous to treat them as a solution. Someone who is depressed because they only ever work and never see friends may use anti-depressants to feel less depressed, but if they still do nothing but work, they have simply turned themselves into homo laborans, one who exists purely as a subject of labour. This uses anti-depressants not as a method of solving the issue, but as a coping mechanism which only serves to allow themselves to further their own exploitation and exhaustion.

In summary, they are an incredibly useful tool, but every tool should be used properly. If we recognize what depression is, the usage becomes more clear. I think this may be able to help people in their journey to getting better if they have been prescribed anti-depressants. They are a part of the process, but not the destination.

Goals and Healing

For both sadness and depression, the goal is the same: feeling better. I said earlier that I think they are distinctly different, but I think the goals for healing are incredibly similar. Healing from these conditions is simply to return to being happy as a person and living under circumstances good for a human to live under. Some of this we can control, and some of this we cannot.

For both sadness and depression, community is incredibly useful. For sadness, it brings a method of venting and connection that can help create new memories to expunge the sadness and trauma of the past as you move forward. For depression, it creates an environment of connection and support that is good for a social being. Creating a close and trusting bond with a larger community as well as having multiple communities of any size you feel safe around is an integral part of the healing process.

Everyone should also pick up a craft that they do for themselves. Creating something physical with the sweat of one's brow, creating from nothing, taking something raw and turning it into a work worth more than the sum of its parts. Alienation from labour can be devastatingly alienating, but being completely in tune with one's work can be a joy. You can create for yourself or others, but it must be on your own terms and through your own personal labour. For sadness, emotion can be put into creating that can help process raw emotion alongside processing raw materials. Learning more also provides new direction to move forward. For depression, it is a return to the humanity of labour that can be rare right now. Many contractors say that no matter what they will never work a desk job because of how soul-sucking they are, even if the contract work is brutal on its own. At least it connects them to their work, which is a cognitive relief.

Lastly, lowering the rate of stimulus is a must. The world is a constant barrage of forces all competing to monopolize your attention for any amount of time. There is no easy escape from this. We can, however, reduce time on social media and be more mindful of what we are doing when we are on social media. I set app usage timers on my phone which I find useful for this. How often do you really find something useful on a late-night scroll? How much time is spent actually catching up and how much time is just mindlessly scrolling? That's what I thought. For sadness, being alone with your thoughts for a while can be instrumental in actually processing your emotions, even if it doesn't feel good in the moment. To have additional stimulus is to run away from processing your emotions, which means delaying their complete resolution. For depression, time away from stimulus provides the best cognitive rest. Even boredom, which we dread so much, brings about opportunity for new whimsical experiences alone or with friends which will provide more lasting memories than any daily doom-scroll ever could.

The goal is to feel better. This ramble has helped me process a lot of my thoughts, maybe it has done the same for you.

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Steady tryin' to maintain I'ma find a perfect balance we gon' be al-

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Oncle Spenny