Is life leaving you ‘Demoralised’?

A message dropped into my in-box reminding me that this is mental health awareness week and that set me thinking.  Is it really surprising there is a massive increase in mental illness, especially among young people? Could it be that often when we are labelled ‘mentally ill’ we are responding quite naturally to a sick world?

Lots of writers believe this to be the case. They have given new names to and identified interesting causes for conditions which we generally think of ‘anxiety’ ‘depression’ or ‘stress’.

First up is the idea that those suffering ‘depression’ could often more accurately be described as ‘demoralised’.  

John F Schumaker,  in his book ‘The Demoralized Mind’, sees the massive increase in ‘depression’ in recent years as masking the fact many people who are diagnosed with ‘depression’ are in fact often suffering ‘demoralization’ a condition which he sees as a realistic response to the circumstances impinging on a person’s life.

He says that the driving forces of our consumer culture, individualism, materialism, hyper-competition, greed, over-competition, over-work, hurriedness and debt, have a negative impace on our all-round well-being. We struggle to find meaning in life, we often suffer boredom, we feel frustrated and demoralised.

Schumaker sees that ‘Never before has a cultural system inculcated its followers to suppress so much of their humanity. Leading this hostile takeover of the collective psyche are increasingly sophisticated propaganda and misinformation industries that traffic the illusion of consumer happiness by wildly amplifying our expectations of the material world.’

Identifying our economic system as the cause of the massive increase in depression in our 21st Century world is also central to Johann Hari’s book “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of  Depression’. He identifies our innate needs for purpose in and control of our lives as being side-lined in unbridled capitalism’s need for economic growth at all costs.

The very same message came loud and clear from Matt Haig’s brilliant book ‘Reasons to stay alive’ which is a pretty damning indictment of our modern consumerist society.  He said: The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigrants. How do you get them to buy insurance? - By making them worry about everything.’