Depression in teenagers is real suffering as much any other psychological problem. It’s a cry for help and a message waiting to be listened to. It’s a gift given to a sick society which fails to appreciate it.
I’ve been depressed and I know that it hurts from first-hand experience. I have also been determined to transform it into a gift.
Depression is a gift
Depression is a gift because it tells us that we are living an inhuman life. We are manipulated to serve someone else’s purposes but something in us screams against it.
The good news is that we can listen to depression and learn. We can take advantage of its message and learn to give our personal meaning to our lives instead of obeying the nihilist forces that want to use us for their own purposes.
Nihilist forces opposed to human psychological growth are unfortunately one of the main characteristics of the profoundly sick Western societies. They have a long tradition, now they are just getting worse.
The good news is that they have no power over us if we don’t give it to them.
Why people find depression scary
What prevents people from taking advantage of the precious message depression holds for us?
Let’s have a look at the attitude people have towards depression.
Depression seems to be a dirty word to people. This is because they have an even bigger problem and depression reminds them of it. It tells them about the elephant in the room that they don’t want to see.
Depression reminds people that they are depressed as well and that they are wasting their lives by accepting being manipulated to serve the purposes of the nihilist forces I mentioned above.
To realize this is harsh, but it’s liberating as well.
Modern man is depressed
As I said, people don’t want to know about depression because they are depressed as well and they don’t want to see it. It’s too disturbing.
They are manipulated to be depressed from a young age. Depression means that you accept becoming powerless and surrender your human powers to someone else. Absence of depression means that you trust yourself with using your human powers and become the leader of your life. It also means that everyone around you helps you to give birth to your human powers simply because in a sane society everyone helps everyone else.
Modern people are manipulated to become docile consumers who don’t even know why they consume. They have to accept being conditioned by advertising to consume compulsively and to forget that they have the human power of making sense of their purchases.
Those who work to make goods have to be humiliated by seeing that the result of their efforts will be treated with very little respect and forgotten quickly to be replaced by other stuff in a frenzy of nonsense shopping.
Modern people are bored while at the same time they are asked to fake excitement.
If we are bored, we have a problem. We are failing to make sense of our lives and to give them our personal meanings. This happens easily in a society in which others want to decide about the meaning of our life. This is depressing.
We can make sense of our lives if we are given, or give ourselves, an authentic freedom to express ourselves and to fall in love with our genuine and spontaneous interests.
In modern society freedom is fake and conformity, which is the opposite of freedom, is enforced instead by the use of psychological violence.
Disobedience is key
Depressed teenagers are the ones who suspect that this conformity presented as something good is actually psychological violence. They have to trust this suspicion and rebel against conformity.
This is difficult to do because conformity is forced on them with so much psychological violence, now with the use of psychotropic drugs as well.
The last achievement of the science of violence is to give hyperactive children, who are simply genuine children, some drugs to dumb them down.
Can depressed teenagers hope? Yes, they can because despite the violence presented as good by the forces of nihilism, non-violence is still possible. It requires disobedience and courage, which are still available to us if we decide to use them.
