A new report published by Survival International reveals that the appalling suicide rate among the indigenous Guarani Kaiowá people of southern Brazil is the highest in the world.
The rate of self-inflicted deaths within the tribe is 34 times the Brazilian national average, and statistically the highest among any society anywhere on earth. Suicide rates among many other indigenous peoples such as Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans in Alaska also remain exceptionally high. This can be viewed as the inevitable result of the historical and continuing theft of their land and of “development” being forced upon them.
The report, “Progress can Kill,” exposes the devastating consequences of loss of land and autonomy on tribal peoples. As well as the shockingly high suicide rates among tribes, it also reveals high rates of alcoholism, obesity, depression and other health problems.
Particularly striking statistics include the sky-rocketing rates of HIV infection in West Papua, which increased from almost no cases in 2000 to over 10,000 by 2015, and the rate of infant mortality among Aboriginal Australians – twice that in wider Australian society. In large parts of the world, poor nutrition continues to cause further problems, such as malnutrition for Guarani children in Brazil, who are forced to live on roadsides, and obesity for many Native Americans, for whom junk food is the only viable option.
Roy Sesana of the Botswana Bushmen, forcibly evicted from their land in 2002, said: “What kind of development is this when the people lead shorter lives than before? They catch HIV/AIDS. Our children are beaten in school and won’t go. Some become prostitutes. We are not allowed to hunt. They fight because they are bored and get drunk. They are starting to commit suicide. We never saw this before. Is this ‘development?’”
Olimpio, of the Guajajara tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, said: “We are against the type of development the government is proposing. I think some non-Indians’ idea of ‘progress’ is crazy! They come with these aggressive ideas of progress and impose them on us, human beings, especially on indigenous peoples who are the most oppressed of all. For us, this is not progress at all.”
All of these statistics demonstrate the fatal consequences of forcing change on tribal societies in the name of “progress” and “development.” In many cases, tribes have been forced to move away from abundant and sustainable food sources and a sure source of identity in favour of poverty and marginalization on the fringes of mainstream society. Tragic repercussions of such forced change can continue even several generations down the line.
Around the world, tribes continue to fight for the recognition of their right to live on their lands in peace. Where this right has been respected or restored, tribes flourish. For example after the creation of an indigenous reserve in the northern Amazon in 1992, medical teams worked with tribal shamans and together they halved the mortality rate among the Yanomami Indians. Likewise, the Jarawa In India live on their ancestral lands and enjoy what has been called a “life of opulence.” Nutrionists rate their diet as “optimum.”
For more information you can download Survival’s new short report, “Progress can kill,” and a more in-depth paper for those wanting to know more.
Around the world development is robbing tribal people of their land, self-sufficiency and pride and leaving them with nothing. Watch this short, satirical film, written by Oren Ginzburg and narrated by actor and comedian David Mitchell, which tells the story of how tribal peoples are being destroyed in the name of “development.”
Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, is calling for the United Nations to enforce better protection of tribal land rights and to call on governments to uphold their commitments to their indigenous peoples.
Sitting on the patio at the Park City Library on a crisp September afternoon, I admire the beauty of this season’s new dusting of snow on mountains awash in the golds, reds, and greens of fall. I arrived in Park City last week thinking I will live in Utah again for the first time in almost 10 years.
The mountains’ timelessness makes it hard to believe it’s been 10 years since I packed my parents’ 1992 black Chevy suburban on a cold December night in Cedar City in 2005 before making the long drive to Iowa to be closer to my family in the Midwest. The joy that the sight of new snow has always produced for me makes it hard to believe its been 10 years since I last watched the good, thick Utah snow gather behind me to cloud the scene from my rear-view mirror as I pulled away softening the reminders of what and who I left behind.
Almost immediately after recognizing this beauty, I feel a deep pang of anxiety. I have been reading about the impacts climate change will have on Utah’s snow. I know, for example, that many scientists agree with Porter Fox, the author of DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, that there will be no snow in Utah by the end of this century if climate change cannot be stopped.
My memories make it incredibly painful to imagine a Utah without snow, but this is the reality confronting us. Loving the snow as I do and understanding what the snow means to both humans and non-humans in Utah, I cannot help but call human-produced climate change “suicidal.”
***
I am intimately familiar with suicide. Sometime in the ten years after leaving Utah, I developed what my doctors have called “major depressive disorder.” When I was a public defender in Kenosha, WI, I tried to kill myself in April, 2013 and, again, in August, 2013.
I have spent the last two years trying to understand the darknesses that led me to attempt to take my own life those two times. I’ve always possessed a certain type of melancholy, but it takes more than a simple disposition for melancholy to develop suicidal depression.
Many theories exist for why I took the road to attempted suicides.
First, I have a history of traumatic head injuries including a brain contusion I suffered in a high school football game. I cannot remember what happened, but I do remember watching the game film the next morning and seeing my head bounce like a ball on the turf after I was knocked completely off my feet. I do not know if I suffered full-blown concussions playing college football at the University of Dayton, but I do remember my head hurting an awful lot. This theory supports the view that depression is truly a mental illness. My doctors tell me my brain struggles to recycle serotonin, and that this could be a result of the head injuries.
Another theory roots the depression I experience in my history of disconnection from any one place. I’ve never lived anywhere for long and this perpetual moving creates a feeling of spiritual vertigo for me. I was born in Evansville, IN, moved to Bedford, IN, moved to Salt Lake City, went to Cedar City, UT, re-joined my family in Waterloo, IA, headed to Dayton for college, then Madison, WI for law school, and on to Milwaukee to work in the public defender’s office. I lived in all of these places before I was 26. Each uprooting came with its own specific pains. Eventually, however, like a plant who will not take to new soil, I rejected the idea I could ever grow roots anywhere.
The final theory for my suicide attempts – and the one that makes the most sense to me – points to an overwhelming mixture of exhaustion, guilt, and despair I built as a public defender watching client after client dragged away to prison while I woke every morning to read news reports of ever more environmental destruction. I worked 60 and 70 hour weeks and it never seemed to matter. I could not keep my clients out of prison. I brought my case files home and some nights woke up at 3 AM to get a head start on the day. The more I lost, the stronger my feelings of guilt grew. It was my fault. I needed to work harder. The harder I worked, the more exhausted I became. The more exhausted I became, the harder it was to fight the guilt. The more guilt I felt, the harder I told myself I needed to work.
On top of this, I recognized – and still do – the fact that the planet’s life support systems are under attack by forces like climate change causing a growing number of scientists to predict human extinction by as soon as 2050. Carcinogens have seeped so deeply into the earth that every mother in the world has contaminants like dioxin in her breast milk; humans have successfully poisoned the most sacred physical bond between mother and child.
Meanwhile, nearly 50 percent of all other species are disappearing. Between 100-200 species a day are going extinct around the world. One quarter of the world’s coral reefs have been murdered. In the United States, alone, 95% of old growth forests are gone. In 70 countries worldwide there are no longer any original forests at all.
I often try to apologize for listing off these facts, or explain that perhaps I fixate on these things because I have a mental illness. I will not do that any longer. These atrocities are happening. Unless you are a sociopath, to truly contemplate these facts, to understand what they mean, to feel their implications comes with a profound emotional cost. I might have a mental illness, but it is natural to feel despair when confronted with the possibility of the destruction of all life on the planet.
***
I return to Utah after spending two years on the road supporting indigenous-led land-based environmental struggles. Why, just months after trying to commit suicide, did I set out for the front lines of the environmental movement?
Well, my experiences tell me that emotional states like despair, by themselves, are illusions and cannot hurt me on their own. Afflicted as I often am with a poor self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy, I learned that even when those thoughts arise, I do not have to entertain them. I can let them flash across the movie screen in my mind without ever attaching any meaning to them.
Despair by itself cannot kill me. I can kill me. Feeling the despair, I can grind several pills into powder, snort the powder to numb the pain, and then drink down the rest of the pills. Similarly, feeling the despair, I could put a gun to my temple or jump from a bridge. But, in each of these cases, it will not be the despair that kills me. It will be a physical action that kills me.
I find this realization to be deeply empowering. While I cannot always control my emotional state, I can control my actions. No matter how much despair I feel, I can refuse to act on that despair. Following this idea, I started to understand that I was not going to heal my mental illness with thoughts alone. I was not going to think my way out of depression. In order to heal, I needed to take tangible steps to alleviate the despair I was feeling.
First, I went up to central British Columbia to volunteer at the Unist’ot’en Camp. The Unist’ot’en Camp is an indigenous cultural center and pipeline blockade on the traditional, unceded territory of the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. I helped to build a bunkhouse on the precise GPS coordinates of a pipeline that would carry fossil fuels from the Fort McMurray tar-sands in Alberta over Unist’ot’en territory to a refinery in Kitimat, BC where the fossil fuels would be processed and shipped to be burned in markets world wide. I helped to break trails and walked the trapline on Unist’ot’en territory in the winter. Most of my time was spent sleeping on floors and couches in Victoria, BC as I volunteered for fundraising and organizing efforts to support the Camp.
I ran out of money in Canada and found it difficult to find work as a non-citizen, so I returned to my parents’ home in San Ramon, CA. Before long, though, I was encouraged to head to Hawai’i to write about Kanaka Maolis’ (native Hawaiians’) efforts to prevent the Thirty Meter Telescope from being constructed on the summit of their most sacred mountain, Mauna Kea. I spent 37 nights at 9,200 feet sleeping on the cold ground. I saw more snow than beaches in Hawai’i and was present when the police tried to force a way through 800 Kanaka Maoli as they blocked the construction equipment from gaining Mauna Kea’s summit. The police arrested 12 people that day, but were forced to turn back when boulders were rolled into the one road leading to the construction site.
Sometimes people try to thank me for my environmental activism. I always want to tell them not to thank me. I had to do it. All the thanks should go to the Unist’ot’en Clan and Kanaka Maoli for their bravery in protecting the Earth.
There’s a darker side to my decision to give up on a mainstream lifestyle to more effectively support environmental causes. I quit my job, gave up my apartment lease, sold my car, and broke up with the woman I was dating (a woman who stayed with me through the suicide attempts) in order to take off for Canada. It was not long before my money ran out and I was relying entirely on the generosity of others to help me along the way.
There are times when I wonder if it really is all that brave to turn my back on the normal responsibilities adults in this culture must attend to for basic survival. Getting a real job terrifies me. Maybe all I was doing on the road was avoiding putting my life back together after the suicide attempts?
***
While I ponder the snow from the Park City Library, I am reminded that I should be working on several of the online content writing gigs I have taken in an effort to re-build a sustainable income for myself. While I was on the road, I got sick of being broke. I became profoundly lonely for familiar places. I began to crave consistency in my day-to-day life.
I have a friend here in Park City, for example – the truest kind of friend who earned my trust after years of selfless communication and sincere concern for my well-being – who reminded me while I was on the road that I was always welcome in Utah. Her words were deeply encouraging, but I also knew I might not have enough money to get to Utah to see her. The truth is, to maintain relationships, you have to – at least sometimes – see those with whom you seek relationship.
The content writing gigs are a reminder of the long path facing me back to financial self-sufficiency. I would be lying if I did not confess the despair I sometimes feel when I realize just how out of control I let my personal life get. My student loans did not pay themselves. My resume can not magically produce an explanation for the hole in my work history. I still do not have enough money in my bank account to pay a first month rent and deposit to secure my own place to live.
Looking at my situation, the darkness begins to creep back in. I feel a deep sense of guilt wondering if I’ve sold out the environmental movement in order to build a community for myself. What right do I have to slow down right now? How can I look the Unist’ot’en Clan or Kanaka Maoli in the eye while their homes are under attack and I’m writing content for personal injury lawyers? Seeing the beauty of the snow on Park City’s peaks, knowing Utah may soon be too hot for snow to exist, why am I not running back to the front lines?
When these thoughts begin to spiral, I know I am in danger. I begin to hear that old whispering, suggesting a way out. I remember that there is a route to numb this confusion. It would not take too much of an effort to make it all fade away.
There the snow is again, though, and I know I will never try to kill myself again. I see the dark, heavy clouds weighing on the mountains’ shoulders. The chill in the air is a comfort because it brings the promise of water. As the powder spreads down the mountainsides, I know for another season, at least, there will be snowmelt, the streams will swell, and life will flourish across the land.
The snow in Park City brings a lesson. The snow is the future. Where there is snow, there is water and where there is water, there is life. Despair is the inability to see a livable future. Those who are destroying the planet are also destroying our future. When they clear-cut a forest, they clear-cut the future for those living in the forest. When they dam a river, they dam that river’s future. When they burn their fossil fuels and boil the Earth’s temperatures so that the snow in Park City disappears, they’re burning and boiling Park City’s future.
The snow, then, gives me my medicine for despair. The snow is the future. Fight for the snow, fight to ensure that the snow will continue to fall, and seeing the snow fall will bring the ability to see a livable future.
Colorado Plateau, southern Utah
Thoughts of suicide still sometimes fleet across my mind. Suicide’s mystique fades after you’ve gone through the spiritual process and the physical actions to produce your own death. The scariest part about it is that it really isn’t that scary at all. Suicide can come so easily.
But, the snow falls, and I know I cannot help the snow if I am dead. I am still engaged in war with my own demons and have had to re-consider my capacity, but if I can defeat those demons maybe I can become a stronger activist than I ever thought possible. The snow is too beautiful, the joy I feel seeing the snow is too strong, and the first stirrings of a feeling of belonging in Park City are too compelling for me to ever give in like that again.
Will Falk is a former public defender turned environmental writer and activist. He has been engaged in support for aboriginal sovereignty on the front lines at the Unist’ot’en Camp in so-called British Columbia and on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i. He is in the process of moving to Park City, Utah.
Thoughts on Dylan Roof, The Charleston Shooting, The Spectacle of Death, & The Roanoke Killings
by Dominique Christina / Deep Green Resistance
I hate writing about this stuff…
But today in Roanoke Virginia, a black man gunned down three people on live television, killing two of them. He even held a camera phone up to record himself doing the deed. I got wind of it late. That is usually the case for me. I actively avoid the news. It leads me toward feelings of hopelessness and I have kids to raise. I have to have enough language left in me to give them hope or something like it. But social media has a way of making sure you know things. I saw tweets like: And…And just like that I am again entangled in the too frequent conversation about violence in this country and gun laws, and questions about motive and debates about whether or not it was race-related and the connection between this event and the shooting in Charleston where nine people were killed by Dylan Roof who was named by the Roanoke shooter in the manifesto he wrote and sent to a news station two hours after he murdered the two newscasters.
And in spite of myself I went looking for who this man was that shot and killed two people on live television in Virginia today. And I found this…
But then I found this…
And I watched video that showed this woman…
…just moments before she was gunned down. You can hear her screaming…or somebody…somebody is screaming…and it is the same unlanguageable hurt that visits us regularly now. We’ve seen it all before. It’s almost naive to call it “unthinkable” now. We have made a home of it. The old familiar anguish, if you aren’t too desensitized to feel that, visits but only stays around a couple of days before we are right back to our lives, our business trips, our smart phones…But this shooting made me remember when my paradigm changed…
My son was just seven months old when two young men walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado killing fellow students and a teacher. I had just completed my Master’s program at The University of Arkansas and had moved back to Denver with my young son. My advisor had arranged for me to complete my student teaching in Colorado. I was assigned to Columbine High School. I was scheduled for a visit on the day of the shootings. But something happened that morning. My infant son woke up early with a cold. His first. I was a new mother. I freaked out. Called the school, told someone at the front desk that I was going to have to reschedule, was assured that that would be fine, hung up, and nursed my son until we both went back to sleep. When I woke up I turned on the television and saw this…
And this…
And this…
I didn’t have any language for it. I had no point of reference for it. A shooting at a school? What world was this?
In the days that followed, I, like many, grieved for the students, the teachers, and the parents. Like most folk, I struggled to make sense of it. America, the violent, was not news to me. But this new ugly rattled me. A lot. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t let go of the images of students pouring out of the school screaming. I needed answers. And then…
The parents of Isaiah Shoels, the only African American student killed in the Columbine shooting, decided to make their son’s wake and funeral available to the public. I decided to go.
At the wake I met Isaiah Shoels’ mother and stepfather. I talked with them for a long time. I was honored to be allowed to do so. I let their grief engulf me. They had just lost a son to unimaginable violence…unimaginable because it was the suburbs; unimaginable because it was in a school with so much privilege, unimaginable because they had moved to Littleton to ESCAPE the violence they knew and were met with another kind. I let their grief engulf me because I had my own precious son, unkilled and waiting for me at home. The very LEAST I could do was stand still and hold a space for them. I promised them both I would attend the funeral the next day. I promised them I would never forget Isaiah.
Before I left the wake I stared at him in that coffin. I was shell-shocked and destabilized by the whole damn thing. I remember having to pull over in my car when I left Pipkin Mortuary. The ululation…pinned me to the steering wheel and hung on for a good while.
I brought my son with me to the funeral the next day. There are things I remember with absolute clarity and other things are lost to the sadness. I remember the choir. I remember them singing “No weapon formed against me, shall prosper.” I remember the swell of folk in the church that day. I remember pressing my son so tightly against me at one point he squealed in protest and a man standing behind me reached out his hands and took my baby from me so I could cry like I needed to. I remember those things. I remember the church being stuffed with mourners and reporters…I remember his parents’ faces…
At some point I left the church that day. At some point I let the memory of Isaiah Shoels slip from around my neck and while I have NEVER forgotten that young man, I have not quite carried him with me either. I’m not sure if that’s noble or not. Today brought it all back though…
The man in Roanoke Virginia did something unspeakable. He murdered two people and he did so in a manner that encouraged spectacle. He wanted an audience. He wanted to inherit the legacy of other mass shooters. He named them in his manifesto. I will not do so here but…that broke me.
In the scraps that have been made available to the public from his manifesto, the shooter talks about being bullied for being black and gay. If that is true I doubt it not. This is America after all. Where God looks like a straight white man with a 401K plan. That is not a statement intended to legitimize what the shooter did. It is, however, a statement about the real life consequences of treating people like second class citizens and then using the old bootstrap anecdote on them when they become dysfunctional. Powder kegs often blow.
But here’s what I’m left with…in the wake of the Roanoke shooting, the thing that stuck out to me most profoundly was the media’s treatment of the event. Yeah…I’m going there…
The shooting of the two newscasters was done on live television. The shooter seemed deliberate about wanting the spectacle. But media outlets refused to show the killing. MSNBC stated that fact flatly. They would not show the video. CNN has just announced that they will “only” show the video of the journalists being shot once per hour. Here’s why that is noteworthy…
CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and others ran a constant loop of Michael Brown’s body, which lay on the ground for more than four hours after he was shot. They did not blur the image. They did not make speeches about “honoring the family” or “protecting the public from the horror.” I never heard descriptors like “gruesome” and “ghastly” attached to the sight of an 18 year old black boy’s body in the middle of the street, the blood pouring from his head and face creating a highway of blood several feet away from him.
Or this…
Eric Garner being murdered in front of our very eyes at the hands of NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo…it was played over and over again on various news stations. No pretty speeches about honoring the family, no blurred image. You can literally watch Eric Garner die whenever you like.
And the video of Tamir Rice, 12 years old, being shot dead by police officers in Cleveland which I still can’t watch but, which is readily available online if I ever change my mind.
And this…
The surveillance video inside Walmart that shows John Crawford being shot dead for holding a BB gun that was for sale in that same Walmart…found easily online…
And Walter Scott, a black man in South Carolina, shot in the back by a police officer who later lied and planted evidence…you know…standard procedure…
And this…Samuel Dubose…shot in the face by a University of Cincinatti cop who stopped Mr. Dubose because…he did not have a front plate on his car.
I can’t get on the internet anymore without seeing at least one streaming video showing a black or brown body being brutalized or murdered. It is literally EVERYWHERE. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr…oh yeah…remember Kajieme Powell? The young man who was shot by police in Saint Louis RIGHT after the death of Mike Brown? His death is available online too. See?
And on and on. Death as spectacle. But only if it is a black or brown body.
The televised shooting of the two journalists is being protected in a particular way and do you know why? Because they are human beings. And they are being treated as such. Their death is a tragedy. It is being treated as such. The victims and the victims’ families are being honored by not turning their murder into something to gawk at; something to be triggered and traumatized by.
But we have seen black bodies on display before.
There is no accident in such behavior. You brutalize a body out loud and in full view because of the function it serves. What better way to train docility, fear, or apathy into a people than to show them it is always hunting season. And they are ALWAYS the prey.
It’s like: “Look! I can murder you in front of witnesses and STILL get off. The system is designed to protect me and annihilate you. The spectacle of horror….
Now listen. I am not itching to see the two newscasters being shot. This ain’t that. If that’s your read of what I’ve said, go back and start at the beginning cuz I ain’t got time to help you grasp the obvious. What I am talking about is the inherent racism in regarding black bodies as sound bite and constant loop while holding white bodies with reverence and respect. What happened to the newscasters was loathsome. What happened to Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Samuel Dubose and so many others, was…you know…normal. And often times, while the loop of some black person’s death played on major media outlets, reporters were having conversations about the victims that vilified them in death. “She had marijuana in her system.” And, “He had been arrested before for a suspended license.” And “He had been suspended from school for smoking weed.” On and on…
And that’s the shit up with which we cannot put.
There has not been rigorous conversation about the possibility of mental illness in the shooter in Roanoke. Nobody is poking into the newscasters past to find out if they had ever smoked marijuana or been pulled over for a busted tail light or been convicted of petty theft. But in each case, when it is about a black or brown person being killed, those conversations are stentorian, all while the video of their death is played on a loop.
What I do know, is that at some point soon, we will all need to risk something in order to have deliberate and intentional conversations about race and the legacy of violence in this country. If we don’t, there will be more blood, more hashtags, more videos, more breaking news, more spectacle, and…there will be more events like the one in Roanoke. And if I know nothing else, I KNOW America is not ready to see marginalized folk invert that mechanism the way the shooter in Virginia did. Trust me, once you allow for one act of brutality to go uninterrupted, you permission the space for others like it.
The Roanoke shooter attributed his behavior to the Charleston shooting. He expressed admiration for the Columbine and Virginia Tech shooters. He aspired to be like them. Who’s ready for that to become the template of normal? For brothers to go gunning down the folk they feel are oppressing them? You ready for that? Because violence almost never trickles up. But it did that day.
I hate writing about this stuff.
I do not want my children to grow up in a world that feeds them a steady diet of executions, and particularly the executions of black and brown bodies while handling white bodies with care. I do not know what toll this has already taken on their psyche as black children trying to navigate this place. I’m not even sure what woman I am as a result of constant trauma.
More than that though, I am tired of us avoiding the conversations that are the most urgent. If you want to live, you better look at it. If you want your children to live you better look at it. Otherwise…I suggest you stay indoors. It’s hell out here.
One of my favourite things to think about is death.
However, for some reason, in our industrialised culture, it seems to be the elephant in the room that will one day sit down, right where we are standing, and squish us into nothingness.
Apart from vaguely being addressed by religion, there seems to be a lack of space for death in this culture at all. However, what we resist, persists—and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the civilisation that doesn’t talk about death is hurtling head first toward total ecological destruction and the death of our entire species.
So the question we need to ask is, why?
Why do we treat death like an embarrassing secret, even though it happens to every single person on the planet?
Could it be that an open and intimate relationship with death would take away the power of the media, the advertisers and the politicians? Don’t they use the subtle, unconscious notion of death to persuade us into listening to their propaganda? If we had an open and conscious relationship with death, would we be so easily spooked by it?
Perhaps it’s because with death comes the end of consuming? No more tasty meals, exciting holidays or romantic relationships? In a culture that encourages consuming, even in the face of possible annihilation, there is no place for thinking about death. If we considered it too much, perhaps that pair of designer jeans would suddenly seem much less important.
Or is it because industrial civilisation has completely detached us from the cycles of life and death, and the circle of life has become an abstraction?
A city is a perfect symbol for perpetual life and the economics that run it are also based on perpetual growth and perpetual consumption (a bit like cancer). What is missing here is the death part of the cycle. The time when the system breathes out and shrinks back.
Working with the land means you come to know how soil works (and how important soil is for life). You come to know that all the microorganisms, the bacteria, the fungi and the mini beasts will be pleased to welcome your body back into the soil. And then it doesn’t seem so dark and frightening, after all. It’s just another part of the cycle.
Ignoring the “dark” side of life finds its way into other aspects of our culture as well.
The new age trend of “positive thinking” is one such thing. When we choose not to see the darkness in our culture, and in ourselves, then we are choosing to be unconscious. Consciousness is facing all aspects of reality, whether they fit into our ideas of good or bad, light or dark. And it’s sad to say, but there are a lot of dark aspects of Western culture that need to be brought into consciousness, sooner rather than later.
Another aspect of ignoring the darkness is avoiding conflict and pain.
Conflict can be an extremely uncomfortable process, but what usually happens is that we cut ourselves off half way through the process because we have a belief that the darkness, pain and conflict shouldn’t exist. Luckily for some, this isn’t the case; but in others conflict is avoided at all costs (and manifested in stressed and tense bodies instead).
However, if we are brave and face the uncomfortable feelings, face the death of our egoic attachments, then we will always continue along the cycle toward the light again.
It could be said that the impact of industrial culture on the planet is one such cycle, and in some ways I would agree. Perhaps we needed to go through the disconnection from the land and each other to really appreciate what we had before.
It’s time, however, that we made that move and let this destructive part of our history die before we destroy our habitat completely.
If you watched any commercial television in the early 1990s, you may remember the Old Milwaukee beer ad featuring pleased men relaxing with a couple sixpacks, agreeing that “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Advertising has a way of being more effective the more farfetched it becomes, by way of memorable slogans and images rather than accuracy. Anyone who has tasted Old Milwaukee can assure you it does get better than this. But any dubious, subjective claim might still sell something, so long as buyers can at least pretend to believe it. Capitalism needs to make—at the very least—a hypothetical promise of fulfillment and anything so hard to come by is an easy sale, especially when it’s cheap and one is poor.
Because civilization requires class divisions to create a labor pool to do menial and dangerous work, so long as it exists there will always be those whose only contentment will come from some product or other. Television, alcohol, drugs, refined sugar, and gambling might head a list of such surrogates. If we see civilization as a vicious pyramid scheme and not the advanced condition of society that it claims to be, the role of chemical and media distractions in our lives becomes clear. If life doesn’t get any better than Old Milwaukee beer, then that is what we’ll buy. If eating is the closest thing to love we feel, then eat we will. And someone always wins the lottery, after all.
For many, substances and entertainment become not an augmentation to a satisfying life, but a substitute, and the effects vary widely from person to person and group to group. Alcohol has a much more devastating effect on those with little metabolic ability to process it, for example, and it’s an insidious process. The onetime casual drinker might find herself absorbed by a daily ten drinks. The occasional betting man may come to see his savings, house, and family vanish into a casino. Diversion often becomes addiction; self-medication transforms into crisis.
Clinical psychologist Janina Fisher summarizes this progression: “The first assumption is that any addictive behavior begins as a survival strategy: as a way to numb, wall off intrusive memories, self-soothe, increase hypervigilance, combat depression, or facilitate dissociating. The addiction results from the fact that these psychoactive substances require continual increases in dosage to maintain the same self-medicating effect and eventually are needed just to ward off physical and emotional withdrawal.” [1]
In our last essay [2] we reviewed the options available to the one in four US adults who suffer from a “diagnosable mental disorder,”[3] options that increasingly are dominated by psychiatric medications. While these popular drugs may be useful as a short-term remedy to severe problems, behavior and talk therapy appears to be more durable and less risky. [4] Yet given a choice between months or years of hard, introspective work and a pill that takes a second to swallow, it isn’t surprising that many take the shortcut. One out of three doctor’s office visits by women, for instance, include prescription of an antidepressant drug. [5]
Antidepressants and antipsychotics sales multiplied almost fifty times from 1985 to 2008, to $24.2 billion. [6] Sales of prescription antidepressants declined from $11.6 billion in 2010 to $11 billion in 2011; [7] by comparison, liquor sales hit $19.9 billion in 2011, up 4 percent from 2010. [8] And this is only in the US, where seventy-nine thousand deaths are blamed on alcohol annually and alcoholism is the third highest lifestyle-related cause of death. About 40 percent of US hospital beds not devoted to maternity and intensive care are occupied by someone with an alcohol-related illness. [9] Americans spend a lot of money on booze and its aftereffects.
Because most alcoholics will insist there is no problem—or at least no alcohol problem—it’s impossible to say whether a bottle of vodka is for harmless leisure or desperate treatment of a harrowing emotional emergency. Alcoholism is hard to define, and no one even clearly understands how alcohol works on the human body. Any addiction is hard to define. It could simply be something you can’t stop. The American Heritage Dictionary calls it “the condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or involved in something,” a “compulsive physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance.”
Most humans have a desire to feel good, to minimize pain and effort and maximize ease and pleasure. We also seem to enjoy repeated experiences; watch someone at a slot machine sometime, mechanically feeding coin after coin, eerily rapt. Who doesn’t want a sense of meaning and substance to their days, a feeling of profundity, or simply relief from worry and regret? These can be achieved through discipline, surrender of controlling behaviors and cultivation of new behaviors—all without damaging your body and mind—but you can also find a toxic mimic of peace of mind by medicating yourself with chemicals or passive, fabricated experiences. The latter options have a grim list of negative consequences, from liver cirrhosis to obesity to insanity, all of which distance the user from authenticity, adventure, and self-respect. Pornography and alcohol aren’t known for aiding good romantic relationships, and an oxycontin monkey on your back will not steer you to happiness. Yet the prevalence of addictive behavior and the damage it causes shows that many try anyway.
The Problem with Alcohol
Our own experience with chemicals varies widely, as it does with anyone: To pick alcohol as maybe the most common of civilization’s intoxicants, Hyatt has been good and drunk—staggering, vomiting—only twice in her life. Carter, on the other hand, never met a drink he couldn’t live with, or a cigarette he didn’t like. In his prime he could put away a six-pack of strong beer and a bottle of wine a night with only a faint headache the next day. Certainly by some definitions this is alcoholism. Though he hasn’t smoked for seven years or drank any alcohol for a year and a half, they remain for him substances with a lingering, obsessive attraction, a rueful glamorous draw. He can’t watch someone have a smoke without a mix of disgust and ragged envy. It doesn’t last long and it’s only a tiny struggle to get past the feelings, but they are there.
The problem with alcohol, an experienced therapist tells us, is that we put it in our mouths. Just like the problem with oil and coal is that we burn it. Until we engage with it, it just sits there, benign and innocuous; when we do engage it, it becomes a relationship. We don’t ordinarily think of interactions with chemicals to be relationships, so it’s hard to imagine “abusing” them. Do drug abusers punch their needles, yell at their pills? When people intentionally cut themselves, they’re not abusing the knife.
It’s more a question of how we choose to treat ourselves. Consider a bad relationship you’ve been in. Remember the pattern of alternating moments of clinging and rejection, bliss and sour regret, warm contentment and self-loathing, sure belonging and desolate unworthiness. Once a relationship becomes abusive, it doesn’t stop being abusive, it only lingers and escalates, doing more damage. Power is being exerted in a bewilderingly damaging way.
Addiction may be the advanced condition of a toxic relationship, and the only way life improves then is to end the relationship. Any reforming alcoholic can tell you the attraction of living without alcohol isn’t in the absence of booze, the void where the relationship was; it’s in the promise of vitality, surprise, and freedom from intoxicated depression in new relationships.
The Anatomy of Avoidance
Our way of life, which we did not choose, requires most of us to spend most of our waking time at jobs that make us unhappy.[10] Our sense of optimism and interest in life erodes when what we want to do is usually subordinate to what we have to do. This is the baseline of civilized existence, the background circumstances. The amount of time spent at work is something humans haven’t evolved with—instead it is a condition that spread by conquest, like agriculture and industry. We are still creatures of the Paleolithic, leading lives based on entrapment by a contrived economy.
Add some everyday stressors: appointments, family conflicts, arguments with partners, fear of violence, illnesses, even small annoyances. If work weren’t a necessity—the bind nearly all civilized people are in—these stressors wouldn’t amount to much more than everyday matters easily resolved. If staying home and tending to a child’s illness didn’t get you fired, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. In healthy, intact indigenous cultures, light-heartedness is the normal condition. [11] In civilization, it’s a rarity, the most ephemeral enjoyment. It’s no wonder we avoid every hard task we can. Paradoxically, work itself is a highly acceptable method of avoidance, though a hard-driven capitalist can do more damage than a homeless crack addict could ever dream of.
This isn’t avoidance in the sense of swerving to avoid a car crash; instead, it’s a pattern of learned behavior, a way of responding to negative feelings. It’s our responses, rather than the negative feelings themselves, that determine our emotional condition. Emotional learning takes place whether perceived threats actually exist or not. [12] If you avoid bathing for fear of sharks in the tub, even if you know full well how irrational the fear is you still condition yourself to a response—you’re rewarded by the alleviation of your discomfort by not doing what it is you fear. But of course some problems remain, and grow.
Procrastination is a classic example of avoidance behavior that breeds anxiety because the thing we’re putting off continues to plague and unsettle. The perceived discomfort of resolution continues to escalate out of proportion to reality. How big a deal is it to wash the dishes? An extremely big deal, eventually. Pile on some more serious tasks like resolving an argument or a medical issue, and you have a mess easily soothed by booze, a pill, a casual hook-up (who hopefully doesn’t mind a reeking sinkful of dishes). These temporary fixes don’t resolve the problems, however. When they are habit forming and have their own destructive consequences, they become additional problems, also easy to mediate by simply continuing them. Problem drinkers know well that nothing fixes a hangover like the hair of the dog.
Avoidance becomes a part of your personality, and a way of life. It becomes more oppressive than all you’re avoiding; it demands your energy and attention, until you can feel it pressing in on you from outside, worrying itself from the inside. It nags and cajoles, urges quick solutions, makes self-serving promises. It is the parent of indifference, the older sibling to addiction. Apathy and numbing are defenses against the overwhelming anxiety formed by avoidance. For anyone working for social and environmental justice, where trauma and loss are everyday realities, avoidance can be very attractive, but eventually disastrous. How can anyone live fully in (let alone protect) the world if they are stuck in habits that lead to disconnection and withdrawal from the world?
Treatment Options
By the time an alcohol or drug problem becomes serious enough that it can’t be ignored, when a DUI or organ failure or intervention by others has forced it out of the protection racket of avoidance, the sufferer’s life is likely so compromised by damaged relationships and financial problems that finding the resources to deal with it can be extremely difficult. Until the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, there was no very effective means of treating alcoholism. AA and its spinoffs—Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and others organized around the Twelve Steps principles of recovery—don’t offer a huge statistical hope of success, but they do offer some, [13] and are far better than the snake pit asylums that used to await chronic alcoholics.
Twelve Step groups and the spiritual, community-oriented recovery plan they use are controversial. The language of the Steps [14] sounds suspiciously Christian in tone, though in practice it’s entirely secular; no particular religious group sponsors AA. The organization holds that alcoholism is a disease, a view that’s strenuously objected to by other recovery approaches. [15] The multiple methods now available are good news for addicts, who’d be well advised to be open to anything that might work. Scrutinizing the life preserver when you’ve gone down for the proverbial third time is as good a description of the insanity of addiction as any.
This doesn’t mean that any one thing or another will work, of course. AA members, well aware of how their message is often doubted, like to say “take what you need and leave the rest.” One therapist we talked with, skeptical of AA, nevertheless remarked that disliking AA is one of the best reasons to go to their meetings, because it makes you think about—and hopefully begin to understand—the nature of your problems. In this small space, we can offer only a quick analysis of Twelve Step programs; we think they’re well worth looking into for their widespread presence, emphasis on engagement with others, and group problem-solving. And they’re free.
There are no other settings we’re aware of where one can be well-understood, respectfully listened to, and given zero slack for rationalizing bullshit. Alcoholics tend to believe they’re some sort of tragically, perhaps terminally unique actors on a sadist’s stage, shat upon daily by an unjust god. Hearing the same experiences of others on a routine basis (newcomers to AA are encouraged to attend ninety meetings in ninety days) dissolves this addiction-serving worldview, and builds a sense of community and common interest with others where once only egocentrism and false pride stood.
Any member of the dominant culture could well use just such a transformation. Only the incremental deposing of assumed godlike power will rescue the biosphere from civilization. The experiences of wretched addicts, who have managed to surrender control, are relevant to all who wish to understand how this mechanism might work. Addiction is one of civilization’s options for hiding from responsibility, for staying in denial, for avoiding our duty to the living world. Recovery means finding a healthy way of listening to our anxieties and engaging with others to create and live a meaningful life.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Alcoholics Anonymous World Services. Alcoholics Anonymous. New York: AA World Services, 2001.
________. Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. New York: AA World Services, 1994.
Evans, Patricia. The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond. Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2010.
Friends in Recovery. Edited by Kathleen W. 12 Steps to Freedom: A Recovery Workbook. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1991.
Fuller, Alexander. “In the Shadow of Wounded Knee,” National Geographic, August 2012, 51.
Glendinning, Chellis. My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1994.
Leventhal, Allan M. and Martell, Christopher R. The Myth of Depression as Disease: Limitations and Alternatives to Drug Treatment. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2006.
Peele, Stanton. Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment out of Control.Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989
Trimpey, Jack. Rational Recovery. New York: Pocket Books, 1996.
Villar, Oliver and Cottle, Drew. Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011.
Matthew Miller, MD, ScD1; Sonja A. Swanson, ScM2; Deborah Azrael, PhD1; Virginia Pate, PhD, PhD3; Til Stürmer, MD, ScD3, “Antidepressant Dose, Age, and the Risk of Deliberate Self-harm,” JAMA Intern Med., April 28, 2014,http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1863925
Endnotes
[1] Janina Fisher, Ph.D., “Addictions and Trauma Recovery,” Paper presented at the International Society for the Study of Dissociation, November 13, 2000,http://www.janinafisher.com/pdfs/addictions.pdf
[3] Kessler RC, Chiu WT, Demler O, Walters EE, “Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of twelve-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R),” Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005 Jun;62(6):617-27.
[4] “Studies have shown that behavior therapy provides remedies that are longer-lasting and pose no concerns regarding side effects.” Leventhal and Martell, p. 137.
“A growing number of overdoses of legal opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers led to a 65 percent increase in hospitalizations over seven years,” Katherine Harmon, “Prescription Drug Deaths Increase Dramatically,” Scientific American, April 6, 2010,http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/prescription-drug-deaths/ While not about psychiatric drugs in particular, this article does underscore the hazard in so many medications simply being at large, available for addictive use or accidental overdose and death.
[5] Leventhal and Martell, p. 135.
“Researchers say women are more likely to have depression and anxiety, while more men report substance abuse,” James Ball, “Women 40% more likely than men to develop mental illness, study finds,” The Guardian, 22 May 2013,http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/22/women-men-mental-illness-study
“Writing a prescription to treat a mental health disorder is easy, but it may not always be the safest or most effective route for patients, according to some recent studies and a growing chorus of voices concerned about the rapid rise in the prescription of psychotropic drugs,” Brendan L. Smith, “Inappropriate prescribing,” June 2012 Monitor on Psychology, June 2012, Vol 43, No. 6, print version: page 36, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/prescribing.aspx
[7] Craig W. Lindsley, “The Top Prescription Drugs of 2011 in the United States: Antipsychotics and Antidepressants Once Again Lead CNS Therapeutics,” ACS Chem. Neurosci., 2012, 3 (8), pp 630–631, August 15, 2012,http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/cn3000923 The ACS is the American Chemical Society. The figures for drug sales are located on Table 2.
[9]“Facts about Alcohol,” National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, accessed February 10, 2011.
[10] “According to the Gallup 2013 State of the American Workplace report, 52 percent of American full-time workers said they were ‘disengaged’ at work, meaning that they put time and effort into their work, but didn’t have energy or passion for it. Together, 70 percent of employees said they were either ‘disengaged’ or ‘actively disengaged,’ the latter term defining workers who openly express their discontent and undermine the efforts of their engaged colleagues. Just 30 percent of the workers polled said they felt ‘engaged’ at work, meaning they are ‘involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner.’” Eli Epstein, “How many Americans are unhappy at work?” MSN News, June 25, 2013,http://news.msn.com/us/how-many-americans-are-unhappy-at-work
[11] “In one study, researchers used a storytelling technique to evaluate three groups of Kenyan women: rural women in a traditional village, poor urban women, and middle-class urban women…traditional women almost always told very positive stories that usually had a happy ending. Middle-class urban women told stories that emphasized their own power and competence. Poor urban women’s stories were generally tragic and focused on powerlessness and vulnerability. The researchers note that many poor urban women have ‘lost the security and protection of the old [traditional] system without gaining the power or rewards of the new system,’” Friedman, Ariellad and Todd, Judith. “Kenyan Women Tell a Story: Interpersonal Power of Women in Three Subcultures in Kenya.” Sex Roles 31: 533-546, in Nanda, Serena and Warms, Richard L.Cultural Anthropology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 2004, 387, 388.
[12] Leventhal and Martell, p. 82.
[13] “Accurate reports about the success rates of 12-step programs like AA and NA are notoriously difficult to obtain. The few studies that have attempted to measure the effectiveness of the program have often been contradictory. Fiercely protective of their anonymity, AA forbids researchers from conducting clinical studies of its millions of members. But the organization does conduct its own random surveys every three years. The result of AA’s most recent study in 2007 were promising. According to AA, 33 percent of the 8,000 North American members it surveyed had remained sober for over 10 years. Twelve percent were sober for 5 to 10 years; 24 percent were sober 1 to 5 years; and 31 percent were sober for less than a year,” Kevin Gray, “Does AA Really Work? A Round-Up of Recent Studies,” The Fix, January 29, 2012,http://www.thefix.com/content/the-real-statistics-of-aa7301
[14] “The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. 6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. 7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. 10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. 11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” A.A. World Services, Inc., May 9, 2002, www.aa.org/en_pdfs/smf-121_en.pdf
[15] “Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober. In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: ‘No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA’ in treating alcoholism. This group reached the same conclusion about professional AA-oriented treatment (12-step facilitation therapy, or TSF), which is the core of virtually every alcoholism-rehabilitation program in the country,” Lance Dodes and Zachary Dodes, “Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry,” excerpt in “AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates,” AlterNet, April 2, 2014, http://www.alternet.org/books/pseudoscience-aa-and-rehab?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
Peele, 1989.
Trimpey, 1996.
Susan Hyatt has worked as a project manager at a hazardous waste incinerator, owned a landscaping company focused on native Sonoran Desert plants, and is now a volunteer activist. Michael Carter is a freelance carpenter, writer, and activist. His anti-civilization memoir Kingfisher’s Song was published in 2012. They both volunteer for Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition.
I don’t know how to write this, but it looks like humanity is finished.
Many of us know it in our hearts. We watch as civilization marches us to the edge of the cliff. We look around to find most governments refusing to implement the radical shifts needed to save us. We hear screams as governments kill those who fight back. We are searching for the serious resistance movement we have needed for the last sixty years while nothing materializes. Even though we have invented a million reasons why we’ll be saved like the belief in technology or a faith in economics, we know what is happening.
Of course, this culture is suspicious of the implications of any easily observable phenomenon that is not stamped with the approval of the currently dominating priesthood – I mean – scientific community. And, even the scientists have known our doom for decades.
University of Arizona Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology Guy McPherson predicts human extinction by 2030 and keeps an up-to-date climate change summary on his website Nature Bats Last. McPherson keeps track of positively reinforcing feedback loops set into motion by climate change. These feedback loops are the great multipliers of climate change. Once in motion, they are virtually impossible to stop and they all lead to a planet that cannot support human life. The first feedback loop was observed in 2010 and in just four years McPherson’s list has grown to include 30 self-reinforcing feedback loops.
Brilliant Australian biologist Frank Fenner says the writing is on the wall. [1]
And John Davies, writing for the Arctic Methane Emergency Group, says we’re at the beginning of a run-away greenhouse event that will kill off humans by 2040.
In short, we’re fucked.
***
These words have been beating at the box of denial I built inside myself for too long. The bruises that have come from too much silence are too uncomfortable for me to maintain my silence any longer.
Let the knowledge sink in. Let it weigh on your shoulders. Let it pull you to the ground for a second and rub your face in the dirt of reality. Let it kick you in the gut and double you over with plain truth. Let it boil the acid in your stomach until you’re sick with honest anxiety.
Think about what happens when a loved one dies. Think about the emotional and spiritual energy it takes to overcome the tragedy. Think about the sleepless nights, the numb feeling at the funeral, and the horrible dreams that follow you for years after their death.
Now, think about what will happen when all your loved ones die.
These are the dark times we live in. Everywhere I go people tell me that the truth is just too depressing. Many don’t disagree with me, but they say it’s all too much to face.
There are plenty of people who will deny the truth. Frankly, it’s too late for them. There are people who will accept the truth, then throw up their arms, and opt to party their remaining days away. I cannot understand this. I cannot understand how even if there only exists the tiniest of chances to succeed we wouldn’t use all our power to try to succeed.
I am not writing to the truth-deniers or the partiers. I am writing to those of you who still possess enough empathy to defend what you love, but who may be caught in the grips of depression.
***
I am intimately familiar with the overwhelming paralysis of depression.
I began my professional career as a young public defender determined to combat the destructive forces in the so-called criminal justice system. I came face to face with institutional racism and colonial violence.
I set as many cases for trial as I could. I pushed the envelope with unorthodox arguments whenever I thought it wouldn’t hurt my clients. I argued with my boss about office-wide tactics. I beat my head against the wall. I pushed Sisyphus’ rock up the hill. Just as Audre Lorde pointed out when she said “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” it quickly became apparent that nothing I did working with the state-sanctioned tools made available to me as a public defender would be effective in combating the state’s oppression.
Eventually, I developed a severe case of depression. One day, after I spent several weeks preparing for a trial only to have the judge ignore my speedy trial demand because the prosecutor showed up unprepared resulting in my client having to sit in jail for another 60 days on misdemeanor charges he still was not convicted of, the depression overcame me.
I came home from dinner with friends. I ground up a couple sleeping pills with the butt of a kitchen knife and snorted them to dull the pain inhering to what I was about to do next.
I filled up a glass of water, thinking about how good water tastes and briefly looking at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Then, I downed the entire bottle of sleeping pills.
I’ve been recovering for the last year and on a path of self-discovery more intense than I could have imagined.
What have I learned? Two things.
First, depression, no matter how bad it hurts, on its own is just a feeling and feelings cannot kill you.
Don’t get me wrong. You can kill you. You can take too many pills and die. You can develop cancer from pollutants introduced into the air, the water, or the soil by corporations hell-bent on turning the world into a profit and die. You can stand in the way of a police officer when he comes to remove you from your home when you can’t pay rent, be shot, and die.
But, in each of these examples it will ultimately be physical and material forces that produce your death. It will not be a feeling or emotional state.
Which brings me to the second thing I’ve learned and that is there really is only one medicine for depression: Action. Action that changes material conditions.
No matter how many therapists I talk to, no matter how many psychiatrists I see, and no matter how many anti-depressants I take, the only way to push through the grey fog of depression is to act. To get out of the grey fog of depression, you have to stand up and blow the fog away or travel to a new locale where there is no fog.
Put another way, you have to do something.
Action is particularly effective against depression when your actions can literally change the conditions producing the depression. If an abusive relationship is causing depression, leaving it works best. If a bad job is causing depression, finding a new one works best. If the destruction of the world is causing depression, stopping the destruction works best.
I understand that there are some situations producing depression that we have no control over. No matter how we act, we will not bring a dead child back to life. No matter how we act, we cannot erase an act of violence done to us in the past. Action, however, is still helpful. The path to recovery for a parent who loses a child might involve counseling other parents who have lost children. The victim of violence might find the strength to beat depression in advocating for other victims.
***
We started with the fact that humans are probably going extinct and it is causing widespread depression.
Do we or do we not have control over the extinction of humans? Are there actions we can take that will stop the extinction?
I do not know. I want to think that if we could topple civilization right now, if we could knock down the dams, stop the mining, tear up the pipelines, and blow up the power stations, we still might have a fighting chance.
But, there’s a sense that the question doesn’t matter. I asked you earlier to let the feeling of our desperate situation wash over you. I asked you to consider the deaths of your loved ones. The truth is the problem is even scarier than the death of our loved ones. The problem is the destruction of a livable planet. The problem is the destruction of everything, because without a livable planet we have nothing.
So, I ask: Who among us can sit idly by while our loved ones are doomed to death – while everything is doomed to death – and not act with every ounce of our power?
Action is still possible. And once you start, you’ll begin to feel better. I promise.
