We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.
Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health” – physical, mental, and emotional.
Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.
Depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!
Harry Anslinger is our own darkest impulses, given a government department and a license to kill.
Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers.
She had felt homesick. But she was at home.
To the prohibitionists, Hannah is a failure, because she continued using drugs. To the Portland, she was a success, because she knew she was loved. One day, a very senior government minister came to visit the safe injection rooms, and to meet the addicts. He asked Liz: “What percentage of people who use this place would you consider to be write-offs?” She paused and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell him that the answer is none.
Yet all over the United States – all over the world – police officers were noticing something strange. If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists, the number of violent racist attacks goes down. But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn’t go down. Another.
The addicts started to insist on being at every meeting where drug policy was discussed. They took a slogan from the movements of psychiatric patients who were fighting to be treated decently: “Nothing about us, without us.” Their message was: We’re here. We’re human. We’re alive. Don’t talk about us as if we are nothing.
The primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a “chemical imbalance” was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It’s lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.
Materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.
It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear.
The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own.
The Conservative government decided to “merge” John’s clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean – a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters.
The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure.” It’s a beautiful theory.
Materialism is KFC for the soul.
Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.
The scientific evidence is clear that exercise significantly reduces depression and anxiety.