We Need to Have Sympathy for Those With Depression. It is an Illness
Fuck this shit.<p>We need to have sympathy. Not because we've diagnosed someone with a disease, but because they're a person.<p>Rates of depression are skyrocketing all over the developed world and whatever we're doing clearly isn't working. Personally, I think the most obvious issue is that a group of intelligent people have simply accepted the notion that what's relevant isn't someone's life circumstances, but some vague and baseless notion of "abnormal brain chemistry".<p>The idea of depression is a miserable cop-out, it's simply victim-blaming. We say that there is something wrong with their brains, rather than saying that there is something wrong with society. If someone is unhappy, we need to support them. It is a dismal failure of our humanity if we require the justification of medical necessity to show basic compassion.<p>Swartz had obvious reasons to be miserable and obvious reasons to want to kill himself. We failed him, we fucked up. He didn't die of a disease, he killed himself because he quite justifiably felt that the circumstances of his life were intolerable. We didn't do enough as a community to support him and protect him. He was a young and vulnerable man, bearing the wrath of a spiteful government. It's shameful for us to even consider for a moment that there might be something wrong with Swartz's brain, when our failures to care for him are so obvious.<p>If we need a scientific explanation for why we should care about each other, that's our problem. If we require a doctor's say-so to provide support for someone in difficulty, that's our disease.