When Therapy Helps

My apologies to those following this series for going so long without writing. It's been a very busy few weeks for me. I got hired full time at my job, had to deal with a kid with a flu, got sick myself, got injured, and just had a broken tooth removed. Haven't had much time for writing.

So let's get started. This post discusses chapters 9 and 21 of Johann Hari's book Lost Connections. These chapters discuss childhood trauma. And let me do the content warning that we leftists like to do: Child abuse, rape (although if you're a victim of either, this post might help as well. Feel free to make your own decision on reading).

I don't know too many people without childhood trauma. The world is fucked up like that I guess.

Johann Hari was abused by an adult in his life that wasn't his parents. He names one example of the abuse. He was strangled with an electrical cord. And for most of his life, he thought it was his fault. He was being punished for being bad, and he went most of his life thinking it was his fault that a grown ass adult strangled him. To quote:

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hardcore addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. When you're a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can't move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you're powerless-that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there's simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it's your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power-at least in your own mind. If it's your fault, then there's something you can do that might make it different. You aren't a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You're the person controlling the machine."

When I decided to start this series, I mentioned that I stopped seeing a therapist because they couldn't help me. Even they knew it. I went through two therapists in a year, and after a few months, both of them asked me point blank, "What do you get out of this?" Which is therapist speak for, "Why are you still coming here? I can't fix you." And they were right. They couldn't fix me because I had very good reasons for being depressed. I had real world problems that they weren't capable of solving.

But this is one of those times when therapy actually does help.

Studies were done on the subject, and it was found that when you talk about childhood trauma with a therapist, it definitely helps. Therapists are trained to be kind and compassionate when you talk about trauma, and that's what helps to make things better. To quote the book again:

"In a smaller pilot study, after being asked these questions [about childhood trauma], the patients were given the options of discussing what had happened in a session with a psychoanalyst. Those patients were 50 percent less likely to come back to the doctor saying they felt physically ill, or seeking drugs, in the following year.

So it appeared that they were visiting the doctor less because they were actually getting less anxious, and less unwell. These were startling results. How could that be? The answer, Vincent [the doctor that performed the experiment on talking about trauma] suspects, has to do with shame. "In that very brief process," he told me, "one person tells somebody else who's important to them...something (they regard as) deeply shameful about themselves, typically for the first time in their life. And they come out of that with the realization-"I still seems to be accepted by this person". It's potentially transformative.

What this suggests is it's not just the childhood trauma in itself that causes these problems, including depression and anxiety-it's hiding away the childhood trauma. It's not telling anyone because you're ashamed. When you lock it away in your mind, it festers, and the sense of shame grows. As a doctor, Vincent can't (alas) invent time machines to go back and prevent the abuse. But he can help his patients to stop hiding, and to stop feeling ashamed."

So therapy helps if you have childhood trauma. Speaking to someone who is kind and empathetic to what happened to you helps to alleviate your depression.

If you have past trauma in this matter, please make an appointment to see a therapist. They can help you.

I still have to put up a photo to draw in folks on my Facebook feed. So here's someone that faced some hardcore childhood depression. Motherfucking Arya Stark!

Wanting Stuff Makes us Depressed

So, going on with Johann Hari's book Lost Connections, we have a chapter that might be hard to relate to, especially if you're struggling with money issues, but it's worth looking into anyway.

Chapters 8 and 19, the disconnection to, and reconnection to, meaningful values.

It's hard to imagine people talking about "meaningful values" nowadays without someone trying to sell you Jesus, and that's why I thought the title was weird when I began to read chapter 8. But, the chapters don't have to do with religion, but the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motives.

An intrinsic motive is something you do because you want to do it. You think it'll make you a better person. You learn to play an instrument. You learn how to be a better friend. You lift weights.

An extrinsic motive is something you don't want to do,, but you do to get something. You want money, recognition, sex, superior status, etc.

So we all have intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Studies have been done on the subject on extrinsic goals and happiness, and everyone of them says the same thing: Those that achieve extrinsic goals don't become more happy. If anything, they become more depressed.

For many people, the extrinsic goals is a manifestation of materialism. People who work to get the big house, the nice car, the fancy jewelry, they find themselves feeling depressed and anxious and they don't know why.

I thought of my dad when I was reading about this. My dad has plenty of money, and he spends it. Before he retired, he would take lavish vacations to Mexico with his wife every year. After he retired, he bought a luxurious motor home and they take cross-country road trips every year. Him and his wife have very expensive luxury cars. They live in a McMansion in a very well-off town. He also goes balls-to-the-wall every Christmas (as an example, my wife and I asked for a television for our bedroom and he bought us a 60-inch smart t.v.). My dad has spent his life chasing money and spent plenty to prove that he has it. If you wanted to envy someone with cash, he'd be it.

He also has a medicine cabinet full of antidepressants. He also never learned how to be a good dad or a good friend. He never really learned to be good with people at all. His "friends" were always his work subordinates, and after he retired, they retired him. And it pretty much goes without saying that his kids don't spend much time with him. When I do see him now that he's no longer working, he's lonely and miserable.

And then I thought of myself as a kid as I read more into the chapters. A lot of the chapters do focus on kids, as they make it a point to show how advertising warps our minds at an early age. A famous experiment they mentioned was one where they had two groups of toddlers. One group watched two commercials for toys. The second group wasn't given any ads at all. Then both the groups were told, "You're going to go play in a sandbox, and there's going to be two kids there. The first is a nice boy that doesn't have any toys. The second is a mean boy that has a toy truck. Which one do you want to play with?" The kids that saw the commercial decided that playing with the mean boy was better than playing with the nice boy. The opposite was true for the kids that didn't watch a commercial. So we're taught from an early age that material goods=happiness.

Two parts of the chapters really struck a chord with me. One of the people that was interviewed for the chapter decided to take his family out to the country, disconnect from all forms of materialism, and have mostly lived a happy life. His son was made fun of for his shoes at school. His son was confused by this, asking them, "Why do you care?" I remembered being in fourth grade and made fun of for my clothes. I also wondered why they cared.

When I was in the seventh grade, I became a lot more demanding of my parents to get me nicer clothes and better things, because I was tired of being made fun of for having clothes bought at K-Mart and wearing off-brand shoes. My mom was a single mom at the time, and she did her best to accommodate me. I remember her willing to go halves on me on buying a pair of the Shaq Shoes. Ah yes, The Shaq Shoes. The shoes to have if you were a teenager living in 1994.

These cost $120 twenty-five years ago

And I wanted a Starter Jacket. Starter Jackets, now remembered for being overpriced, overhyped shit, were so popular back then that people were actually murdered over them.

After I got both those things (thanks, mom), I got a few oohs and ahhs from my classmates, but after that, things went back to how they always were. And I didn't give a shit about either after a few weeks.

Fast forward to 2014. For the first time in my life, I have money to burn. I was working 70 hours a week and never seeing my firstborn or my wife, but I was paid. And I wanted to prove that I was paid. So I bought a camper and a brand new Jeep Cherokee. I didn't need either of these things. I already had a decent car that cost about $250 a month, but I wanted to show people that I had money, so I bought a car that cost another $200 a month, and a camper. Five years later and my car has 118,000 miles on it, I've had trouble making the payments (I was actually laid off from that job two months after buying both), and my wife and I miss tent camping. We always liked camping, just not in a trailer. Just like when I was a kid, there was a temporary high of getting the oohs and ahhs from people when I first bought them, but after a few weeks, I felt the same as before I bought them, except now I have an extra $400 a month in expenses.

When the wheels finally fall off of my Jeep, I'll probably just buy a Kia. They're ugly af, but they're at least affordable.

The chapters talk a lot about how advertising affects us and convinces us that buying stuff will make us happy. People that work in the advertisement industry have admitted for nearly a century that the goal of advertising is to make people feel inadequate without their product. Going back to the experiment above involving toddlers, it only took two commercials to convince them that the mean boy with the toy truck was better than the nice boy with no toys. We see way more than two commercials every day. We're told constantly that we're inadequate if we don't buy stuff. We have to work hard to defeat this mentality in ourselves, since we're bombarded with it several times a day.

Now don't get any of this twisted. I've already written extensively on financial distress and the toll it takes on mental health. There's a big difference between buying a big house because you think it'll make you happy and struggling to pay the rent. But we do need a reminder to be more focused on creating real human relationships and being better people than being focused on buying fancy shit.

It's one of the things that makes fitness so great for me. After I had bariatric surgery, I could have gone the route that many people take on their fitness journey and focus on the aesthetic-the extrinsic motivation. If I had gone that route, my fitness journey would have gone in an entirely different direction. I'd be hyper-focused on getting six pack abs, starving myself, and doing my best to make myself look good just to get the admiration of others. Instead, I decided to focus on meeting real fitness goals. I ran a half-marathon. I got started in power-lifting. Even now I'm on a diet not because I'm concerned with people calling me fat or whatever. I'm on it because I want to be healthy, and I don't want to go back to having diabetes and hypertension. I'm glad I chose the intrinsic path this time around. The extrinsic path would have resulted in demotivation, and ultimately, failure.

Two Weeks of Keto

Ahh yes, we're finally back to talking about dieting and fitness (I promise I'll write more on Lost Connections later). 

During my last depression wave, I drank alcohol constantly, ate like shit, and barely made it into the gym. Because of this, my weight went all the way up to 310 pounds and I started feeling the symptoms of diabetes once again. So instead of going on a calorie reduction diet or a carb cycling routine, I just decided it was time to cut out carbs completely.

I didn't really intend to end up on the keto diet. In fact, for the first few days I wasn't doing it. I was just not eating carbs. I didn't know there was a difference between the keto diet, a low carb diet, or the Atkins diet until I started looking up low-carb recipes online for meal prep. Going down that rabbit hole I learned the differences between the diets and that the keto diet isn't just a very, very low-carb diet, but it's also a diet with only a moderate amount of protein and a very, very high amount of fat. It was said that the body will learn to burn all the fat you're eating for energy in the place of carbohydrates. This is in contrast to the Atkins diet, which doesn't regulate fat or protein, but also can leave you feeling very tired throughout the day. Not a feeling you want to have when you're doing squats in the gym. So halfway through my first week, I decided to give this diet a go. The liver takes the fat and converts it into well, whatever's going to be used in place of the carbs. Glucose, maybe? I'm not sure. I don't feel like looking all that shit up again. Just trust me that the fats do the job.

Those that describe the keto diet weren't kidding when they said you have to eat a lot of fat. It's determined that for every calorie you eat of protein, you need to eat three times as many calories as fat. I figured that on the low end of my protein requirements, I probably need at least 200 grams per day Because one gram of protein is four calories, that comes out to eight hundred pounds. So, 800x3=2,400, so I need 2,400 calories of fat on this diet per day. Since one gram of fat equals nine calories, that puts me at about 266 grams a day, or 66 grams of fat per meal, spaced out under four meals. Regardless of what I eat, my carbs should be under 30 grams a day, and definitely never exceed 50 grams.

This has been easy enough to maintain, but it has caused me to spend an insane amount of time in the kitchen. It almost feels like I'm meal prepping, or adding food to my meal prep, on a daily basis. 

I heard on the news a few weeks ago that the keto diet is considered one of the least effective diets because it's so hard to maintain. Two weeks in and I'm wondering why people have a hard time staying on it. The large amount of cooking this diet has required aside, it's not like you're missing out on a lot of your favorite meals. There is a keto version of every recipe you could possibly think of.

There's dozens of different ways to make low-carb bread. Fathead dough, almond bread, keto hamburger buns, keto hot dog buns, keto pasta noodles, etc. That's just the bread part. There's a keto recipe for every type of comfort food out there that you would miss eating on a calorie-restrictive diet. Keto fried chicken, keto mac and cheese, keto breakfast sandwiches, keto pancakes, keto crepes...

keto biscuits, keto pizza, keto ice cream, keto birthday cake...

I did a search for "keto chocolate cake" yesterday just to see if my theory of "keto version of everything" held up. Sure enough...

The keto diet is like the internet's rule 34. If a recipe exists on the internet, there is a keto version of it.

But I don't think it's the lack of food options that makes one quit the diet. I think it's got more to do with the infamous "keto flu".

The keto flu is a brief stretch of time that usually takes place sometime between the beginning of the diet and the end of the second week. During that time, your body hasn't quite figured out that it needs to burn fat in place of carbs, so you start feeling weak and lethargic. I had this happen at the beginning of the second week, but it passed after a few days. If you can get past those few days and wait for your body to adjust, it'll be much easier.

I also haven't had any alcohol since starting this diet fifteen days ago. That's the longest I've gone without drinking since 2016. 

After the first few days of the diet, I felt really good because my blood glucose levels had stabilized, after what was likely a pretty continuous hyperglycemic state. I lost six pounds after the first three days. Then, no weight loss as the keto flu kicked in. Then, five days ago, I started to lose about a pound every day. I'm now down to 299 pounds. I have 29 more to go before I reach my goal, and since I'm planning on being on this diet for a total of 8 weeks, it'll be easy enough to do if current trends hold. 

I'm also working out five days a week. Since I went too long without going to the gm, I'm doing Starting Strength again until I can get my strength levels back up. I'm doing karate twice a week as well.

I plan on at least writing biweekly to track my progress.

This is (Probably) why I'm Depressed, and Maybe why you are, Too

Going into the next section of Lost Connections, we dig into Chapter 7 of Johann Hari's book, titled, "Disconnection from Other People", and also the solution, which is discussed in Chapter 17.

Here's my photo for social media:

For years now, my wife has wondered why I'm always on Facebook so much. I didn't know the answer to that until I read this book.

Even before Facebook and other forms of social media, there were blogs. And I was hooked on them. Before that, internet chat rooms and USENET. Yeah, I'm showing my age. Fucking USENET, people. Back in the days when dial up modems were your only option, and it took fifteen minutes for a teenage boy to download a pic of a nipple.

But there was a brief period when I wasn't hooked on any of these. From about the time I was sixteen until the time I left the Army. Like many people, I used the internet to communicate with family when overseas (as well as meet women on dating sites for when I inevitably returned home, as I was single at the time), but other than that, the internet wasn't that big of a deal for me. I wasn't using it as some form of socialization.

In my early teenage years, in my days before karate and weightlifting, I was bullied a lot. Like, a lot. The internet was in its infancy and my mom got a computer with an AOL account, so I used that to socialize. It helped to deal with being an outcast in school.

In high school, things were dramatically different. I fell into a group of friends, I wasn't bullied anymore (because of the whole karate thing, mostly), so I didn't spend much time online unless it was to look up new bands or (hey, I was young, dammit!) to spend fifteen minutes downloading a pic of a nipple. Occasionally I'd look for martial arts wisdom as well. Nothing but using the internet for what it was intended. Looking up information and porn.

In the Army, you're forced to socialize. Privacy begins and ends when you take a shit in a bathroom stall. I'm not exaggerating. That's the only time you get to be alone. You're required to communicate with people. Because of that, you're also forced to make nice with all sorts of people as well. So the Army forces real life socialization.

Some time after leaving the Army, that changed for me. I started using social media more and more to communicate with people. Many of my best friends are on Facebook. The years passed and friends in real life drifted away, but my buddies online were always there.

And then I had kids, and I had no time to see friends in real life at all. And then my wife wonders why I'm spending all my time on Facebook, and I don't know. I just know that I don't want to be without it. Ever.

And now I get why I'm always on it, and why I'm constantly depressed. I'm lonely.

Before Hari starts talking about social media and internet addiction, he cites a scientist that studied the effects of loneliness on the human body. He found that feeling lonely causes the cortisol hormone in one's body to soar to the same level as being physically assaulted. As Hari put it, "It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger." It has the same effect on your health as being obese. It causes weakening of the immune system. It just sucks all around.

Not only that, but loneliness makes it even harder to make friends and break the cycle of loneliness. When you start to feel isolated, it causes you to to withdraw even further. It's a part of our evolution. If we're isolated, we begin to see threats much more easily, and often times when they're not even there. We feel insulted or judged when there was no intention to do either on the part of the other person. It's a cycle that causes more isolation and more loneliness. In fact, as the book says, for someone that has spent their life in loneliness and isolation, it takes even more love and respect from other people to bring them out of it than a more outgoing and social person would need. And that's a lot of emotional labor that most people don't want to spend on a stranger.

It wasn't just the creation of social media that caused this. Since the 1980s, there's been a steady decline of social engagement among society. Hari cites one example given by the researchers he interviewed: Bowling. In decades past, people would join leagues to bowl. Nowadays, the average bowler goes by themselves. Active involvement in community organizations fell 45%. 

So many of us have turned to social media as a sort of band-aid to deal with the lack of real-world socialization. But Johann Hari compares it to the difference between porn and actual sex. It creates a short term fix, but you need the real thing to be truly satisfied. Hari, when interviewing one of the first therapists for internet addiction, that we've become more accustomed to using the internet as a means of communicating with friends, but what we really need is face to face communication. The internet just isn't the same.

Hari outlined a solution in chapter 17. He talked to a therapist that told a story of a woman that came to him because she was depressed. She was very lonely. So he put her in an experimental program in which she would work with a group of people twice a week in a community garden. The people, who were all suffering from mental health issues, were to build a community garden entirely from scratch. They had to meet twice a week to learn how to garden, to plan the garden, and build the garden. The results were, well, I'll let Hari tell it himself:

So some of you may be wondering, "If this is why you're so depressed, why didn't you discuss this first?"

Well, I had to take the time to discuss how economic factors make people depressed because as I learned about social prescribing, I decided to look into it myself. Try to find like minded groups of people that I could meet up with. I'm still very passionate about politics, so I decided to look up my local DSA chapter to meet up with leftists and find people I have things in common with. I looked at things involving fitness. And I looked and I looked, until I realized, I don't have time for any of these things.

I work nights, and I work almost every weekend. Guess when most of these social gatherings take place? When I'm either stuck at work, or sleeping.

The workplace condition and the social decline in this country are intertwined. In the 1980s, a concept called "neoliberalism" began to take hold. It's what's commonly known as "trickle-down economics". It goes against human nature. We're tribal creatures. We learned to survive for millennia upon millennia by banding together in tribes and working together, but now our economic social condition teaches us that we're all on our own. We're supposed to be able to handle everything ourselves, and if we don't, it means we're weak. And so instead of banding together and demanding better working and living conditions as we did in the past, we try to do it all on our own. We hustle harder. We work longer hours and take the lower wage because we have no means to increase our wage, and that causes us to live at our jobs. We're socially isolating ourselves so that we can afford to pay bills and die. And when someone comes along and talks about a solution to work collectively to make things better, we're told it's just socialism.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but it almost seems like the people that pushed neoliberalism designed it with social isolation in mind.

Well, that starts to make socialism sound pretty good, doesn't it? I mean, you have one side that has embraced some of the absolute worst elements of capitalism screaming, "Fuck you! You're on your own! I don't care if you starve!", and then you have the socialists saying, "We should work together to make the world less shitty and make sure your basic economic needs are met." If millennials and generation z are starting to embrace socialism, the reason for that is pretty obvious.

Is Economic Instability Making You Depressed?

I've been trying to crank out a post every week on the subject of depression as laid out in the book Lost Connections. I missed last week, so I'm shooting for two this week.

Anyway, here's another pic for my post to social media:

Johann Hari titles this chapter, "Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future", and it's chapter 12. He discusses the solution in chapter 22.

Hari mentions several examples of people that have lost a sense of a future. He starts by discussing a Native American chief before and after his tribe was forced onto a reservation, and the effects of it today. He talks about a study done that used both anorexic children and depressed children. And he talked about a personal friend working a shit job. The depressed people all had the same thing in common, and that's the lack of an ability to perceive the future.

My last post talked about how a lack of control over your workplace makes you depressed. This chapter discusses how not having a sense of a good future leads to depression. And how economic instability causes that.

While there were non-economic reasons given for this cause of depression, poor economic health is a major one for most of us, so that's where I'm going to focus this post, as many of us can relate to this cause, and the solution is also an economic one.

Towards the end of the chapter, Hari decided to meet up with an old friend from college named Angela. Angela was very happy and carefree in college. He described her as:

"One of those people who seemed to be doing everything at once—starring in a play, reading Tolstoy, being everyone’s best friend, going out with the hottest boys. She was like a firework of adrenaline, cocktails, and old books."

After college, she couldn't get a job because potential employers saw her as overqualified. Desperate for work, she took a job as a telemarketer. The job paid just above minimum wage. It had no set schedule. If she did poorly in sales, her hours were cut the next week. If she could get a full schedule, she'd have enough money to make lunches from chicken and take the bus to work. If not, she'd be forced to eat beans and walk. She would constantly be berated by her boss and powerless to fight back against him. It's the type of job that one only takes if they're extremely desperate for work, and too powerless to fight back against a boss that deserves to be taken out back and beaten with a metal pipe until dead.

Of course Angela was depressed. She, like many of us, lives a life of temporary personal survival that you have without any sense of financial security. She couldn't even take a vacation if she could somehow afford it, because she doesn't even know what her work schedule is going to be like. She couldn't envision any future outside of the current week because her job made it that way.

A lot of us are the same way. If you're financially insecure, you're in constant survival mode. You can't think long term, because you're just trying to survive to the next day, or at best, until the next paycheck. It's easy to understand how that much stress can cause mental health issues.

In chapter 22, Hari makes a case for what he thinks would be the solution. A universal basic income.

Hari talks about an experiment the Canadian government did in the 1970s. The government decided to give the population of a few small towns the equivalent of $19,000 in today's US dollars, no questions asked. The results were phenomenal in both improving the mental health of the population, and also helping people have the means to secure their own future. To quote:

"Depression and anxiety in the community fell significantly. When it came to severe depression and other mental health disorders that were so bad the patient had to be hospitalized, there was a drop of 9 percent in just three years.

...

It had another unanticipated effect, she told me. If you know you have enough money to live on securely, no matter what happens, you can turn down a job that treats you badly, or that you find humiliating. “It makes you less of a hostage to the job you have, and some of the jobs that people work just in order to survive are terrible, demeaning jobs,” she says. It gave you “that little bit of power to say—I don’t need to stay here.” That meant that employers had to make work more appealing. And over time, it was poised to reduce inequality in the town—which we would expect to reduce the depression caused by extreme status differences."

And contrary to popular opinion, it didn't cause the population to become lazy. While there was some reduction in hours, that time not working was spent being better parents to their kids. In other cases, it caused people to get an education so they could work at a job they wanted to be a part of, instead of being forced into working a shit job.

Hari noted that popular opinion keeps a universal basic income from being possible. Everyone knows that if they had more economic freedom, they'd use it to better themselves. You'd spend more time with your kids (if you have any). You'd go to school. You'd spend your free time volunteering. What you wouldn't do is stay home and watch Netflix all day. Unfortunately many people think that's what everyone else would be doing.

Now, I don't agree with Hari's ideas about a universal basic income, but that's because the numbers were crunched, and it would cause the U.S. national budget to double. It's simply not affordable. However, we can and should find ways to make sure that the basic needs of people are met regardless of whether or not they are gainfully employed.

We have four basic needs. We need food, shelter, education, and medical care. We should be finding ways to make sure that everyone has those basic needs met without forcing them to work. Everyone should have access to all of those things regardless of whether or not they are working. And before anyone says, "That just rewards laziness", look two paragraphs up. When the basic income experiment was done, people still worked. They'll still work because they want to, and also for one other reason:

Luxuries wouldn't be promised. We love luxuries, and all of us are willing to work for them. For some of us, having a kick ass, HDTV with a giant screen is a luxury we want. For others, it's an awesome vacation. For me, it's to have a membership at a good gym, another one at a good dojo, and plenty of time to put some hot lead downrange. All of that takes money, and none of that would be promised to me just because I didn't have to work to avoid starvation and homelessness.

I read this book about a year ago when I was still working as a security officer at an oil refinery. It explained very well why I was depressed. Not only did I hate the lack of control at my job (I was ordered to go to different places hourly, and all of my suggestions to improve the place went into the "deleted" section of my boss' email), but I had to constantly pick up extra shifts to make ends meet. For me, working 60 hours a week wasn't weird. It was just something I had to do. And I was depressed because of it. Now, I have a job that pays much more. I don't have to work overtime now. I'm staying home and doing dad shit.

When I talk to people about supporting programs that would eliminate the need to work for survival, I mention both the mental illness benefits of such programs, but I also talk about it in terms of freedom. Every day, millions of Americans go to work at jobs they hate and do it just so they can barely get paid enough to survive. This country talks a big game about freedom, but if you are forced to work to survive, you are not free. This is known as wage slavery, not to be confused with chattel slavery, which is in and of itself a horrific practice, but it's a form of slavery nonetheless. If our country is going to talk a big game about freedom, we need to find ways to make us truly free. The system of wage slavery needs to be abolished. Our country and our mental health will be better off as a result.

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.