Politics-Related Depression

You know it is real because so many practitioners are seeing it, and each is giving it a different name:

The nation’s politically liberal coasts have seen a months-long outbreak of depression. Here in the San Francisco Bay area, among patients, neighbors, friends, and colleagues, there is palpable gloom. They cite as the reason “the news.” Ever since the election, people have been unable to pull themselves away from our ongoing political soap opera.

“Election depression” has turned into the more chronic “political depression.” In an interview, several psychologists characterized this mood disorder as being commonly marked by nightmares, insomnia, digestive problems, and headaches, with anxiety, jitteriness, chest tightness, and “a hallucinatory sense of slow-motion doom” also possible. Sufferers may describe feeling demoralized and powerless, and even a sense of unreality. People have been missing work and school. They have seen relationships impaired and a decline in daily functioning (these are particular red flags for therapists). One woman even described an inability to put her children to sleep on time due to difficulty tearing herself away from the news.

Although many of these symptoms do overlap with internationally recognized psychiatric mood and anxiety disorders, medicalizing our emotions in relation to a particularly intense political atmosphere may be a slippery slope.

For one thing, genuine depressive disorders and generalized anxiety disorder require therapy; medication and psychotherapy are both standard treatments… Instead, for a start we’d recommend a therapeutic trial of comfort food, something along the lines of roast turkey, dressing, and mashed potatoes (with extra gravy), or maybe a half-pint of a favorite ice cream…

… speaking of dystopian fiction, pharmacotherapy reminds us of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the greater good for society was achieved by minimizing and subduing negative emotions or feelings. In order to accomplish this, whenever individuals became unhappy, they took a gram of soma, a narcotic that transported them into a state of unfeeling unconsciousness. The catchphrase was “A gramme is better than a damn.”

Notice that the guy writing the article advocates for boluses of comfort food, ie dopamine, for people who are depressed due to what really amounts to dopamine addiction. Flooding a depressed person with dopamine will not fix the depression. It is like telling a heroin addict that what they need to do is start taking hits until they feel better. But nobody at NR understands the mechanism, so that is what they advocate. Of course then, a couple of paragraphs down, they advocate against the exact same thing when they criticize Soma, which was really a perfect descriptor of a dopamine agonist. One minute they recommend it, the next they criticize it. Obviously, nobody who understands the mechanisms behind politics is going to start thinking National Review knows what it is talking about any time soon.

This election depression is amygdala-stimulation, heightened by dopamine deficiency. It produces a subtle cognitive force, driving the afflicted person toward a mode of brain function that relieves the angst. That is a designed mechanism.

In an r-selected environment, the angst is relieved by suppressing K-strategists, and denying all possibility of competition, aggression, and resource constriction, while pursuing sex. The liberal’s reality-blind perception of the world, where we import foreigners and give them what they want, disarm everyone, and ostracize into silence anyone who acts K or advocates for the K-strategy, is actually a valid means of shutting amygdala stimulation off. If you can insist on forcing everyone to adhere to that fantasy, it will let you walk around in a little bubble of amygdala-relaxation.

The problem arises when environmental realities will not allow that bubble to exist any longer. When shortage produces aggression and competitiveness that cannot be suppressed by public shaming and ostracizing, then you get a brain that initially will try to continue using its r-selected programming to achieve amygdala-relaxation. As that fails, the brain will produce pain, which is the first step in reprogramming.

This will play subconsciously. Liberals pursue leftist thought, and they feel pain. They may not do the math and see 2+2=4, but the brain knows subconsciously, and eventually thinking liberal thoughts is associated with the pain. That is where openness to the right will begin. Thinking rightist thought and identifying as a conservative will offer relief. Soon, many who now think left will be guided to think right, and they will not even know why. They will just begin to think like us, and then experience the joy and pleasure we enjoy now as Trump racks up win after win.

Never assume that because you are logical, everyone else’s thoughts are guided by logic. Obviously, given that roughly 25% of the population adheres to leftist ideals, many people are guided by the avoidance of cognitive angst, more than logic or reason. You can only understand them through amygdala.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because those it will depress need the depression for their mental health