The Economy of Depression
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One Man's Web > Men's Business > Anatomy of a
Depression >The Economy of Depression
On October 14 2003
Simon Castles published Depression
crosses class boundaries, yet talk therapy is a bit rich in the Sydney
Morning Herald.
Castles notes that "like cancer, depression cuts brutally
across class boundaries. There are scores of famous people who have experienced
mental illness: Winston Churchill, Boris Yeltsin, Kurt Cobain, Billy Joel,
Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe and Alanis Morissette."
He
goes on to say that "if depression is indiscriminate,
access to treatment is not.... Like almost any disease you care to think
of, depression is greatly exacerbated by poverty. "
Castles says
people on welfare have a rate of depression about three times as high as the
general population. " In 1997 The New England Journal of Medicine reported a
confirmed connection between sustained economic hardship and depression. It is a
vicious circle: poverty is depressing, and depression makes it infinitely harder
to escape poverty."
Castles points out an extraordinarily important
thing: "What we're talking about is not simply people feeling a bit low
because they are at the bottom of the heap but clinical depression, a paralysing
physiological condition that leaves sufferers unable to cope with day-to-day
life."
He asks if "we ever think about this when we come down hard on
the unemployed for not meeting their mutual obligations?" I think we often
don't. As a Uniting Church minister with kids I was automatically on
welfare. There are Centrelink offices in South Australia where to walk through
the door seems to immediately brand one as a malingerer. Retirees paying their
first visit to Centrelink often report a profound shock! The notion that
"noncompliance is sometimes possibly quite often a result of mental illness" and
not rebellion or laziness would be completely foreign in this environment. To be
depressed is to be a malingerer by definition, in much of our
society.
When I was ill, the church looked after us. We had a place
to live, by the grace of Synod staff who took our plight seriously. Wendy
had work. If I had been required to appear at job interviews to keep
getting dole payments, I simply would not have been able to do so. I could
barely cope with washing dishes and cleaning the bathroom.
Castles
says,
While debate still rages, most agree that
depression is caused by genetic vulnerability activated by external stress.
And no lives are more stressful than those of people stuck on welfare. (If you
don't believe this, then you've never lived without money or
purpose.)
Indeed, diagnosing depression among the poor can prove
difficult simply because it is so common it can go unnoticed. As Andrew
Solomon writes: "When depression hits someone in the middle classes, it's
relatively easy to recognise. You're going about your essentially OK life and
suddenly you begin feeling bad all the time. For the miserable and oppressed
poor, life has always been lousy and they've never felt great about it;
they've never been able to get or hold a decent job and they certainly never
entertained the idea that they have control over what happens to them."
We saw this when we first came to live in
Elizabeth. The number of miserable and depressed looking people walking
around some shopping centres mid-week was shocking. We noticed how the
atmosphere of these places changed on Thursday nights and Saturdays, when the
employed population would come to do its shopping. And now, after a year
or two, we scarcely notice. We are used to it.
One of the
root meanings of the word compassion is to be empathic. To be with
someone in their passion, or feeling. To understand. Mercy (the old
word for compassion) does not mean to discount responsibility. Neither
does it mean to allow someone to live for ever on welfare, as shock-jocks would
seem to imply. In fact Castle's comments make it very clear that to leave
a person on welfare is to do them a dis-service and be un-merciful. But
the big stick of noncompliance by Centrelink is also un-merciful. It lacks
compassion, and is totally unaware of the struggle some people are having to
survive. As such, it becomes part of the problem, and is not
wellfare at all.
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