I found this on Facebook and I am Extremely Tired
Most mental health professionals (especially clinical social workers) know that material conditions affect the mental health of clients. This is not Brand New Information: it’s something that there’s continuing research in the field. Antidepressants can’t cure the world’s shittiness, but they can make it possible to have the energy to get up, take a shower, eat a meal, and have the wearwithal to do actions that fight structural oppression.
Additionally, mental illness exists in communist countries and countries with large welfare states. Also, communist countries also have a history of abusing mentally ill patients (USSR) or failing to provide care for mentally ill people (Cuba). Some of the causes of mental illness, such as intergenerational trauma are still going to be around during fully automated luxury space communism.
^ I was just going to reblog whichever of the latest iteration of that post to say something like this. No one who knows shit about mental health research is doubting that environmental conditions affect mental health, including possibly triggering it in people who wouldn’t otherwise have symptoms. And sure, there are probably some people in Tumblr’s deeply-fucked “mental health” community who need to hear that maybe their life circumstances are contributing to how they feel.
What we’re taking issue with is how y’all can’t say it without some variation of “anti-depressants are useless and fake so throw them away” when a lot of people on here have had their lives saved by those pills, and those pills specifically. And no one who actually studies this shit, and who actually cares about MI people other than as a talking point, is saying that they should do that.
This attitude also encourages people to think that the relatively materially privileged who suffer from mental illness must be faking it somehow.
Loki is the Philosopher King 