There is the constant, relentless, unremitting financial triage as our financial obligations slowly overwhelm our means of meeting them. The choices are especially painful when they involve responding to one child’s needs over another’s. We have to weigh expensively nurturing a child’s gift against expensively responding to a child’s challenge.

It’s not just the money. To say that there is less use for a 62-year-old white male (unless you happen to be running for president) these days is not to devalue the social transformations that are rapidly occurring in the age of Trump. You can hail necessary social change and complain about being, to some degree, a casualty of it, both at the same time.

In this way, I view myself — and imagine others — caught in a double bind. My depression springs from my biology, my biography, my choices. But it occurs within a far broader context that could bring just about anyone down, and apparently does. The fact is that the country is not red and blue. It is almost entirely blue.

The real national division, as I see it, is between people who have the resources, inner and outer, to survive their mental illness and those who don’t.

Affording a therapist and finding the right therapist — it is rare: wisdom, empathy and kindness cannot be taught — they are the first obstacles to overcome. Then you might have to find the right and affordable psychiatrist, who will help you make an informed decision about whether to take psychiatric drugs that will or will not help, perhaps even saving your life.

Even more people never receive an actual psychiatric diagnosis. A 2014 study found that 80 percent of all prescriptions for antidepressants were being issued by primary care physicians who had no psychological, psychiatric or psychopharmacological training at all.

Yet even as our mental health crisis proliferates, even as streams of books and articles are published about depression and anxiety, the subject of mental illness has become another voyeuristic exhibition in the carnival of commerce. We talk about it, but we don’t talk about how to address it.