Daisy, I think you have it about right. Our country is experiencing an epidemic of demoralization primarily because it has been de-industrialized. Factory jobs have all been outsourced to low wage/high repression countries like China that manufacture everything we need from shoes to shower curtains. Most Americans are not rocket scientists or deep thinkers, Americans make things and build things. And now they don’t, so people have no structure or meaning in their lives. Productive labor has been replaced with cradle-to-grave “security” from the welfare (plantation) state, a subsistence living that requires no effort. So people hang around, do drugs, play with their gadgets. Even very poor people have smart phones in this land of ours. So demoralization, not depression, which is a clinical condition characterized by avolition, loss of interest in anything, anhedonia, pessimism, thoughts of suicide, insomnia/hypersomnia, and so on, to an extent that is disabling. In my clinical work it is common to hear people say they are depressed but what they are really describing is situational unhappiness. And they buy into the drug company propaganda about depression being due to a “chemical imbalance”, a medical condition in other words. For which there is zero evidence. So my people, many of them, embrace their diagnoses, and identify with them, and that allows them to take no responsibility for their lives or decisions (usually very bad ones). Because their life problems have become medicalized. And then they go on antidepressants and their situation becomes chronic and they never get better or worse. But, being on drugs, they don’t care. Yes, I’ve been doing clinical work in the mental health field for a long time and I’m getting out of it mainly because the MH field has almost nothing to do with mental health. MH is simply a conduit to transfer public funds to Big Pharma. It’s all about money and power and as a vector for social control.
