Engaging with current events at this particular moment in modern history feels like an endless rolling panic attack. Floods. Fires. Elections. Impeachment hearings. An indistinguishable shower of grinning authoritarian shitclowns snickering at everyone who tries to stop them stripping the planet for parts. Affectless armies of weaponized nihilists prepared to set the world on fire rather than share it with women and people of color. All of it imploding into a sort of hectic immanence, a frantic collapse of timelines. Sometimes, it can feel like the crisis is too massive for anything any of us do to matter. Sometimes, everything is so urgent and so overwhelming and there’s so much you ought to care about that it’s easier … not to care.

Late one night not long ago, I got a DM from a friend. She was having a hard time. Everything felt futile. Self-care felt stupid. She wanted to know how I “managed to stay hopeful.” At the time, I was horizontal under a bundle of blankets, having once again mistaken being way too stressed out to sleep for wokeness. I’d been working for months on a book that is, in part, about the politics of trauma and depression. I’m still working on it, in fact, because, because I’m a lazy, terrible, tragic waste of human skin, and nobody in their right mind would ever want to read my work or be my friend and self-care is for people who deserve it, and by the way, why am I so cold and tired all the time like my insides have been scraped out and replaced by wet concrete and—oh. Well, this is embarrassing. That’ll be me getting back on the boring old depression-recovery circuit with everyone else.

When I start convincing myself that I’m a useless scrap of spoiling sentient meat whose sole value is in whether I meet the Sisyphean standards of productivity I keep setting for myself, that is my depression talking. It’s also the way culture, on some level, speaks to all of us who struggle. The idea that we can never work hard enough or be good enough. That the best you can do is numb yourself with online shopping and office politics and try not to burn out completely before the planet does. To accept your own helplessness before it’s forced on you.

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Depression and anxiety are on the rise all over the Global North. Yes, depression and anxiety are physiological phenomena, chemical processes that happen in the brain. But that doesn’t mean they’re all in your head. That’s the sort of bloodless neoliberal platitude that only works if you believe that mental ill health is a mysterious phenomenon blooming spontaneously in a sick mind. Like an aneurysm. Or the first Star Wars prequel.

In fact, mental health is a physiological and a political issue. Almost everyone I love is having a hard time right now. Almost everyone I know comes home from a hard day being ground on the wheel of late-stage capitalism and tries to wrap their shattered brain around the very real prospect of species collapse. And almost all of them believe that they’re uniquely awful, that others have it much worse, that they could snap out of it if they weren’t so weak and lazy. Unfortunately, this means that on top of having to save the world, many of them also now have to handle major depression. And when you are depressed, recovery can feel just as impossible as saving the world.

Collectively, a lot of us who want to believe in a better, fairer way of life have lost the sense that there might be a future worth counting on—and that’s no accident. Depression shortens your perspective, quite literally. One of the symptoms reported most frequently by people with severe depressive illness is lack of ability to imagine the future. It’s not just that they can’t imagine anything good happening ever again—they can’t imagine a future at all. The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in his pioneering research on the effects of sustained trauma, showed patients the famous Rorschach inkblots test. He discovered that people who were not traumatized could imagine all sorts of pictures in the random patterns, good and bad—flowers, monsters, murders. What did the traumatized people imagine?