Over the last few decades, there’s been an explosive rise in antidepressant prescriptions. Millions of people – who likely wouldn’t have needed medication a century ago – are now chemically altered to keep functioning. We’re told it’s normal, that depression and anxiety are problems meant to be fixed with pills, but there’s something deeper beneath all this.
Industrial society has created a world that is unnatural for humans to live in. Our daily existence is so far removed from what we’re wired for that it’s no wonder we feel broken. And yet, instead of questioning the system itself, we’re handed antidepressants and told to get back to work.
But why?
What would happen if they didn’t do this. What if they let us realise the truth of the intolerable circumstances that are the very things we are so tolerant towards?
Suicide, Solitude, or Revolution.
If someone is deeply unhappy with the circumstances they are in, or ‘depressed’ as modern health ‘experts’ would say, and nothing changes, then they will want change.
They will want to escape in one way or another. They might flee society, which society doesn’t want. One less person means one less industrial slave. Or they might kill themselves. If they believe it to be their only way to escape they will take their life to leave the modern society, which society doesn’t want. One less person means one less industrial slave. And the last option: revolution. This will occur when a person wants not just to change their own life but also to change others too, which society doesn’t want. Many less people means many less industrial slaves.
Antidepressants aim to make us tolerate the system itself so that we don’t want to change anything about it.
Numbing the Response
Antidepressants don’t solve the root cause of our collective misery – they just make it easier to tolerate. They dull the senses, take the edge off the natural frustration and disillusionment that should, in a healthy world, drive us to seek change. By numbing that response, antidepressants help one endure the very conditions that cause their suffering in the first place.
