> I think we are talking past eachother.

I think we are too.

> You constructed an elaborate and plausible narrative why someone is depressed because of their economic situation. However, it ignores the person in identical situation who is happy. What is different between them?

From my viewpoint, there are four components:

- Personality

- Expectation

- Perception

- Resilience

Starting with the first, imagine you’re really, really into the arts. Maybe you’re really into musical theatre or something like that because you saw them on TV. Now imagine you’re stuck living in an isolated town in Alaska.

Now we can move on to expectation. Maybe you grew up as kid and thought one day I’ll make it out of this town and move to a city where I can work in musical theatre. Or maybe you don’t even have that high expectations, you just want to live in a city where you can watch musical theatre. You think you’ll grow up and earn the money and get out of the town. But it doesn’t go to plan. Maybe you struggle to find a job because you don’t have the skills needed in the area. You’re working as a bartender and don’t seem to have any money left over at the end of the week to put towards your new life. Years go by and you’ve not made any progress. Your dream is fading further and further into the distance.

Which moves on to perception. So many years have gone by that you no longer see any possible way of achieving your expectations and living somewhere that matches your personality. You know what you’re doing isn’t working but you can’t think of anything that will. You fall into a depression. You let your body and mind go to shit.

A year or two goes by and maybe your perception changes and you think “maybe if I train as a lumberjack then I can earn more money and then I’ll be able to save and get out of here.” So you go to college to train as a lumberjack. But you’ve been out of school for a while and you’ve forgotten how long it takes to learn a new skill. You fuck up a lot. You’re not really a lumberjack type so the other students take the piss out of you and you become the butt of the jokes. You try and start running for your mental health but you’re that out of shape that you can’t even run a mile. You give up on both because you haven’t built up enough resilience through previous challenges to make it through.

That last part is absolute key. When you’re exercising, the total stress the body endures needs to be appropriate for it to have the intended effect. If you push someone too hard who is out of shape you risk injuring them.
Even if you’re a seasoned athlete and overtrain, your fitness decreases. Similarly if you don’t work hard enough to trigger growth, your fitness won’t increase.

It is the exact same thing with depression and why some people on here are saying depression is caused because life is too hard and others are saying it’s caused because life is too easy. The stress stimulus needs to be tailored for the individual. For a lot of people the stress is either too high or too low and it is causing major, major problems.
We’re calling both of these polar opposite cause and effects “depression” and it means everyone is shouting at each other rather than coming together and helping each other.

Going back to our original scenario, you might have another poor person who lives in that small Alaska town. Maybe he loved musical theatre too. But maybe his personality extended to other interests so he was happy. Or maybe he never expected much out of life so he was happy. Or maybe he could perceive different opportunities to escape. Or maybe he took the same lumberjack and running route but he knew that it was going to take a long, long time to get good at either and he was going to have suffer and persevere for a long long time.

It doesn’t matter how someone got in the hole, when they decide that they’re ready to get out, society needs to rally around them to offer support. That doesn’t mean to completely molly coddle them but it means that, just like a good coach or physio, you’ve got to realistically evaluate how much stress and damages they’ve endured and how much they can currently tolerate and then gradually increase their ability to handle more over time until they’re back on their feet again. At the minute, in my opinion, society is far too much Led Tasso and not enough Ted Lasso.