Is Your Job Making You Depressed?

This is part two of ten in my posts about the causes of depression. It's also the first one where I'm going to address the nine causes of depression laid out in Johann Hari's book Lost Connections.

I can't stress enough to get the book. If you can't afford to buy it, hit up your local library. I'm just providing the cliff's notes of what's an incredibly good book.

Here as always, is my meme to draw in the social media crowd:

The first chapter of the section discussing the nine major causes of depression is titled Disconnection from Meaningful Work. It starts out by telling the story of a recovering drug addict named Joe. He had a decent paying job at a paint store. Every day, he would clock in, mix paint, and clock out. He'd come in the next day and do the same thing. And again. And again. The monotony of the job wore on him. Not only that, but he felt that his job was pointless. His boss would only see him to chew him out when he was late, and he received no praise for doing his mundane job well. He also hated that his job had no room to grow. His job was just to follow instructions given to him by management and go home. If he had any ideas on how to better run the store, nobody listened or cared. So Joe turned to drugs to deal with his mundane job.

Now some people could try to tell Joe that his job is important. After all, people need paint, so he is providing a valuable service by making sure that people that need paint, have paint. And Joe said that he tried to psych himself up by telling himself that. Yet he couldn't help but feel a sense of dread over the idea that he might be doing that same job for thirty years.

Lost Connections cites a study Gallup did on millions of workers in 142 different countries. They found that only 13% of workers actually like their jobs. Another 63% just sleepwalk through their jobs (like Joe). Another 24% of people hate their jobs so much, that they actively try to sabotage their employer.

Just try to imagine how serious that is. If you work at a corporation that has just 5,000 employees, there are 1,200 coworkers that hate that job so much, they're actively trying to burn it to the ground! Another 3,150 coworkers are just sleepwalking through their job. There's only 650 coworkers that get up and punch in with a smile on their face. Only 650 of your fellow coworkers out of 5,000 enjoy their job, while 1,200 are trying to sabotage your workplace, and a little more than double that are just going through the motions until they clock out.

There's plenty of reasons why people hate their job. The pay sucks. The benefits suck. But this chapter doesn't address that (that's for another chapter, and another post). This is about control.

Joe felt controlled in his workplace, as many of us do. We have a boss that micromanages us, and when we present suggestions to make the company better, they're largely ignored. We're told what to do constantly, and we don't get to have a voice in how the company is run. That was why Joe found his job to be meaningless. That's why many of us find our jobs to be meaningless.

Now if you saw a story like Joe's, some would be tempted to give him some empty platitude like, "Find a job you like, that way, you'll never have to work a day in your life!" But we all know that's bullshit. Even if Joe found a different job, someone else would have to make the paint. Joe might find happiness at another line of work (he said he wanted to become a fishing tour guide in Florida, but didn't want to take the risk of moving and taking a job with less pay). But either way, someone has to make the goddamn paint!

I debate politics often online. One day, I saw in a leftist page a meme that talked about a world without money. I commented, "Then who would do the work?" I told them that if you're a leftist, you're probably in the proletariat (the working class), and if you're in the proletariat, you probably work a shit job. Yet that shit job you work is needed. Someone has to take out the trash, cook the burgers, run that retail gig, etc. And if it weren't for the money, none of us would do it. I didn't get any real answer on who would to those jobs if it weren't for the paycheck.

In chapter 18 of Lost Connections, Johann Hari addresses this. He was curious about the answer as well. He says:

The obstacle is that meaningless work has to be done. It’s not like some of the other causes of depression and anxiety I’ve been talking about, like childhood trauma, or extreme materialism, which are unnecessary malfunctions in the wider system.

Work is essential. I thought about the jobs all my relatives have done. My maternal grandmother cleaned toilets; my maternal grandfather worked on the docks; my paternal grandparents were farmers; my dad was a bus driver; my mother worked in a shelter for victims of domestic violence; my sister is a nurse; my brother orders stock for a supermarket. All of these jobs are necessary. If they stopped being done, then key parts of our society would cease to function.

 After pondering all this, he found the solution in a bike shop in Baltimore, Maryland.

Josh worked in a bike shop most of his life. He loved bikes. But working in a bike shop doesn't pay very well, so he and his fellow coworkers decided to start a union. A bunch of reasonable conditions under a union contract were sent to his boss, who they believed to be a decent man. The conditions were in fact, reasonable. Yearly negotiations over pay as well as permanent contracts for the workers. The boss did as you'd expect if you ever tried to organize a workplace (*cough* no experience there *cough*). He hired a legal firm that specialized in union busting and hired part time workers as scabs.

Josh and his coworkers didn't have the financial ability to take his boss to court over the illegal union busting tactics that his boss was participating in, and his boss knew that. So Josh started reading up on the concept of co-ops.

Democratic Cooperatives are businesses that are owned and controlled by the workers collectively. There's variations in the way they work, but basically, the workers make decisions on how to run the business collectively, there's no bosses (or if there are, they're elected by the workers), and everyone shares in the profits equally.

Josh and his co-workers decided to form a co-op bike shop. With that, Baltimore Bicycle Works was born. The business meets once a week to discuss work issues where everyone has a say in how things are run, and decisions are made democratically. The workers enjoy what they do because they know that they matter. Their ideas on how to run the bike shop are taken into consideration. They share in the profits collectively, instead of being employed on a low wage system. They take in new hires as apprentices, and if they do good work, they get brought on as full partners. Everyone has a voice. Everyone gets the full value of the profit they produce.

It's not a total fairy tale because as Josh's wife, Merideth says, they had to work ten hours a day, every day, for the first year. But even though they had to put in 70 hours a week, they felt that their work was meaningful. They had incentive to make sure their business succeeded.

As I stated above, more than 80% of us are unhappy at our job. Even if we're not working to actively sabotage it, we just see it as a job and nothing else. We know that something is seriously wrong with our system.

I could go on about pay and benefits and all that, but like I said, that's another chapter of the book, and another post, for another time. This is about control, and the lack of it, that we have as workers.

Imagine if we workers collectively owned and controlled the businesses we worked in, instead of having a boss that tells us what to do. How much more free would we feel? What a relief it would feel to know that we belonged to a workplace that was ours! How much more would we enjoy going into work if we knew that our voice had value and was recognized!

We wouldn't be a mass of workers going through the motions in our job, just counting the minutes until we could clock out. We wouldn't be actively trying to sabotage our company, because we own the fucking company!

The Nation published a study that showed that worker co-ops are even more productive than typical top-down businesses because it turns out that when everyone owns the company, everyone wants to make sure that company succeeds. We have the opportunity to become happier, more productive workers if we are able to own, control, and make democratic decisions in how the company is run.

In my personal life, I do like my job. I work security at a hospital. I don't feel micromanaged, because I work the night shift and part of the benefits of working that shift is that upper management is asleep while I'm working. And yet I also know that my voice really doesn't matter in how things are run.

A few weeks ago, many of us had a meeting with senior management and the topic of parking enforcement came up. Even though it doesn't seem like a big deal for those not working in my field, for those of us working security on the night shift, workers parking in places they shouldn't be (like places reserved for patients), this has become a thorn in our side.

I did have a suggestion to improve things, and I told the senior manager that I would email him my suggestion on how to fix things (I didn't want to bring it up in the meeting, because I didn't want to be "that guy" that drags on a meeting when we'd all rather be elsewhere).

I emailed my boss my proposal to fix the parking situation, and I got the response I was expecting. Nothing. No emails back saying anything. And that was exactly what I knew I'd get.

When I was in my twenties, if I proposed something about security issues, I'd be enthusiastic about it. "This is a really great idea, he's got to implement it!", I'd tell myself. And I'd get no response back.

At my age, I have more than a decade of private security experience under my belt. And yet, when I give a suggestion based on that experience, it's the same as always. Not a goddamn thing. And that was what I was expecting. I gave my proposal expecting no response, and that's exactly what I got.

I really don't think my job is making me depressed (I'm sure the real reason lies in what you'll see in a few more posts), but I know that my voice doesn't matter at my job. I'm not controlled much, but I sure as fuck don't have a voice in how to do things, either. Maybe I'm in that 63%.

My wife is a school teacher. She teaches middle school. I can tell that the lack of control in her job gets to her. Middle school students are the worst because they're at that 12-14 year old age where, well, they're just the worst. I don't need to tell you why. We were all there once.

And then there's the combination of both state and private management of her school that micromanages her job. If you work in a really poor district (as she has) there's a standardized test her students have to take every two weeks. Imagine trying to teach a class when every other Friday has to be dedicated to testing. You can't do it! Along with that, she gets an attitude from the kids and their parents, management keeps telling her how to do her job, and the state keeps giving standardized test after standardized test that both keeps her from being able to teach, and measures her abilities as a teacher. The amount of micromanagement she experiences is insane! As a husband, it's enough to make me want to find the few motherfuckers in charge of this shit and start slitting throats. No wonder she's depressed at her job! She has no freedom under it! Just imagine if you had to train dozen of people how to do your job, and you had testing on it every two weeks based on their ability to do that job. The mental strain would make it impossible.

My wife and her fellow teachers (some of which experience severe psychological distress) would be better off just running the school themselves. They're good teachers. They just need to be able to do their jobs without assholes micromanaging every part of their job.

A few posts ago, when I said I would be discussing Lost Connections, I said that the thing that separates this book from other books that talk about depression, is that self-help books that talk about depression are largely bullshit because they offer easy answers that don't really address the actual causes of depression. Lost Connections does us no such favors. This is one solution that none of us can do individually. We as the working class need to do this collectively. We need to rise up, organize, and demand a better system than the top-down management driven workplace that we work in. And that's going to be hard.

Does Poor Diet Cause Depression?

Well, let's throw up another content warning that's all the rage for we leftists nowadays:

CW: Diet, eating disorders

And as always, here's a picture for the social media crowd:

Alright, I finally got enough free time to write out my first post on the causes of depression! Woo hoo!

I'm starting off with number ten on my list, just because this is still a blog discussing health and fitness. I might not go in the order that I presented in my last post after that. A lot of this writing is for me as well as those that read my blog, and part of me wants to write about things that feel more important for discussing what may be causing my depression. Either way, eventually all of the topics will be discussed.

So first things first, could a poor diet be causing people to be depressed?

Well, maybe.

There's been a few studies done on the subject, and every one that I've seen has agreed that obese people are more likely to be depressed. But are people obese because they're depressed, or depressed because they're obese?

The science isn't clear on which part is the cart or the horse, but they are definitely intertwined. To cite an article from Obesity Action Network:

While we still have much to learn about the association between obesity and depression, this much is clear: the link between the two conditions is clear. Considering the devastation either of them alone can cause, research to gain an even better understanding of how and why the two are connected and then identify any additional treatments could benefit many millions of people.

And while I don't talk too much about anorexia or bulimia, there's evidence that depression can cause those eating disorders as well:

Depression may lead to eating disorders, but there’s also evidence that eating disorders can result in depression. “Being severely underweight and malnourished, which is common in anorexia, can cause physiological changes that are known to negatively affect mood states,” says Lisa Lilenfeld, PhD, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Argosy University in Arlington, Va., who specializes in eating disorders.

Depression in people with eating disorders typically has its own unique features, according to Ira M. Sacker, MD, an eating disorders specialist at Langone Medical Center at New York University and author of Regaining Your Self: Understanding and Conquering the Eating Disorder Identity.

“People who develop eating disorders feel as people that they’re not good enough,” Sacker says. “They become obsessed with perfectionism. That perfectionism begins to focus on what they eat. But underlying it is depression and anxiety. Often, these patients have suffered a lot of emotional trauma.”

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that having  poor body image issues can lead to being depressed.

I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes in 2008.  For those that know about the symptoms of diabetes, people with a blood glucose level that's off balance (not between 80-120 mg/dl) often experience extreme mood swings and anger. Having a poor diet caused physiological changes that kept me from being able to feel happy.

Going back to the article from the Obesity Action Network, crash dieting isn't encouraged to help with depression (they can even make things worse). To quote:

In a 2008 review of study outcomes in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (Markowitz et al.), the authors urged clinicians to integrate the treatment of these two diseases and cautioned that dieting, which can worsen mood, and anti-depressants, which can cause weight gain, should be minimized. The authors also recommended that exercise and stress reduction, which have been shown to be effective treatments for both diseases, should be considered a first-line defense.

In my personal experience, there's no cart and no horse. Poor diet and depression are more of a vicious circle. I feel sad, so I stop meal prepping. I eat fast food and drink alcohol excessively. Then I get more depressed, so I eat and drink more. And so on. Until I finally get enough strength in me to start over and work to undo the damage I caused.

I'm not saying that this is the only cause of depression (I still have nine more topics to discuss), nor does eating healthy and exercising will cure you of depression. Just that it will help things. And that's something I'll have to remind myself of for the rest of my life.

Depression Sucks

Gonna toss out a content warning (as we leftists love to do on Facebook nowadays):
Depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide will be discussed here.

First things first, here's my obligatory meme so I can really show off my link on social media:

As we've entered into a near year and we're all another year older, I can say that I've had depression for nearly twenty years now. That's a long fucking time!

Most people think of depression as this permanent fixture, as though you are always sad. This isn't true. Despite my long history of depression, there's been moments where I've experienced happiness. Hell, this blog started with showing me as a very happy, new, thin athlete. My year after I had bariatric surgery was pretty nice. There's been other times when I've felt pretty happy as well. My wedding day. The birth of my kids. The first days when I got home from war. But eventually, depression (and its best bud, anxiety) have always come back.

I've seen therapists and they didn't have a lot of help for me. I saw three therapists between 2015 and 2018, and I ended my sessions with them after each one asked me up front, "What are you hoping to get out of this?" Along with other things they told me, I understood that it was psychologist speak for, "I don't know how to help you." Some would put me on pills, and they would help for a while, but eventually, I'd be back at square one. I began to think I was broken. Three fucking therapists (as well as the VA nurse that I saw back in 2011) couldn't get me to be less depressed and anxious. I am just stuck living with extreme sadness and fear until the day I fucking die.

And that's when you start going to dark places. "What's the point of going on if I have to spend the next 40-60 years of my life feeling like absolute shit?" is a question I've asked myself more than once.

Mental health advocates have long been telling people that depression is something that's in your head. "You have a chemical imbalance in your brain", is what they like to tell you. A lack of serotonin or dopamine is why you feel this way. So when the pills eventually stop working, it makes you feel like shit to know that your brain is fucked up. You go back to feeling broken. Nobody can fix you.

And it's all bullshit.

Almost a year ago I came across a video in my Facebook feed that was interviewing a man named Johann Hari (shown below). The first thing he says is, "You're not crazy. Your pain is not a pathology. Your pain makes sense. We are depressed and anxious in this culture for perfectly good reasons." That is some very comforting words to hear when you've been told for years that you're in pain because you're broken.

After seeing that, I immediately downloaded Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections to my Kindle. I read the entire book in two days. The basic premise of the book is, You're not depressed because you have a broken brain. You're depressed because your life sucks, and it's (probably) not your fault.

After being told for years that I'm depressed because my brain is fucked up, being told the obvious-that my life sucks and I have perfectly good reasons for being depressed and anxious-felt like a breath of fresh air.

Johann Hari's book lists nine reasons why people in our society face depression and anxiety, and I plan on doing a separate post on each one of them, as well as a tenth that I'm adding in. Here's the list of those:

1. Disconnection from Meaningful Work
2. Disconnection from Other People
3. Disconnecting from Meaningful Values
4. Disconnection from Childhood Trauma
5. Disconnection from Status and Respect
6. Disconnection from the Natural World
7. Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future
8. Genetic issues
9. Long Term Effects of Depression on the Brain
10. Poor Nutrition

The last one is the one I added, and I'll probably be discussing that first.

The biggest takeaway from the book is that there aren't any easy solutions for depression. For decades, self help gurus have made a fortune selling books with easy answers, because those answers were always solutions done individually. But they typically don't work, because the real solutions to depression are collective ones. Meaning, we as society need to make major changes. Major changes, that are going to have to be sold to the populace at large before they can be made.

The past three months have been really hard for me. Depression does come in waves, and for the last three months, it's been a rough one.

In my past, depression was easy to manage because I only had to take care of me. I'd wake up whenever I felt like it (I worked nights, so I didn't have to worry about sleeping past my work time), would get drunk and/or high, and spend my whole day playing video games. All the drugs and distraction kept me in a pleasant state of denial about my mental health.

The past few months, I fell back into those habits. I drank to excess almost nightly. I started smoking weed again. And I would spend my night hours playing old Xbox 360 video games. Problem with that now, is I'm a husband and a parent. I can't just wake up whenever and do nothing. I have adult shit. I have to cook food, clean, and spend time with my kids. I got tired from the depression and hangovers, and still had to do all that adult stuff (as well as my job). I would feel good when I was seven sheets to the wind and capturing my thousandth Man of War on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, but being completely drained the next day only made my depression worse.

Depression literally sucks. It sucks the life out of you, and it makes being a responsible adult insanely hard.

Fortunately, I feel like my spell of depression finally broke a few days ago. It's too early to tell if I'm out of the woods (for now, anyway), but at the moment, it feels like coming up for air after nearly drowning.

Lost Connections is available at Amazon or your local library.