Sublime

It was a prophetic work. In it he argued that the breakdown of family, community, and faith had left us fundamentally insecure, deprived of the traditional supports of identity and worth. He did not live to see the age of the selfie, the Facebook profile, designer labels worn on the outside, and the many other forms of “advertisements for myself,”

A depressed mind is pretty adept at buying into a distorted reality.

We are currently in a global mental health crisis that is ruthlessly affecting teens and young adults at a rate unlike anything the world has ever seen. In the dozens and dozens of talks and presentations I’ve given at colleges and universities, this fact seems to be abundantly well-known by those under fifty and almost completely, cluelessly unkno

‘Depression’, writes Ruth Cain, a senior lecturer in law at the University of Kent, ‘may appear almost self-protective: an opt-out from an unwinnable set of continual competitions’.27 Although stigmatised in many ways, it is the healthy response to a mad, uncaring world.

What strikes you when you come out of a deep depression or get close to a depressed person is the utter self-absorption of misery.

What is new is that today, in our secular, individualistic nation, an amorphous illness is seen inevitably as an opportunity to uncover the authentic nature of the self and improve it, a project squarely in line with other obsessions of our neoliberal society.

Renowned physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté is a sought after expert on addiction, trauma, and childhood development. In this brilliant episode of  Pulling the Thread , he discusses various themes revolving around the relationship between stress and illness, a subject he's clinically explored over the course of four decades.

the depressive realism hypothesis. This theory argues that depressed people aren’t depressed because they distort reality; they’re depressed because they see reality more clearly than other people do.