[D66] A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health

[R.O.]

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/future-no-future-depression-left-politics-mental-health

Mikkel Krause Frantzen holds a PhD from the Department of Arts and 
Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, and is currently 
postdoctoral fellow at University of Aalborg, Denmark. He is the author 
of Going Nowhere, Slow — The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (Zero 
Books, 2019).

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danletras • 8 months ago

Question: "It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are 
neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their 
causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted 
by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why 
particular individuals have low levels of serotonin." -- Mark Fisher

Answer: “We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, 
sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of 
modern life.”—Stephen Ilardi, PhD

By far, the writers/thinkers/activists doing the most important and most 
useful work responding to the questions posed by Mark Fisher and by 
Mikkel Krause Frantzen are the anti-civilization (anti-civ) or 
anarcho-primitivist philosophers, such as Chellis Glendenning, John 
Zerzan, Kevin Tucker, Daniel Quinn, Lierre Keith, Paul Shepard, Derrick 
Jensen, Layla Abdel Rahim and others. The thesis that they pursue is 
that our bodies and our brains evolved within and for environments and 
social systems that were radically different than the situations in 
which we find ourselves today. As the author Christopher Ryan puts it in 
his 2019 book "Civilized to Death," we are like animals trapped in zoos 
and cages, except that we ourselves designed the zoos and cages. These 
authors look to the nonhierarchical, place-based lifeways of indigenous 
hunter gatherer peoples for glimpses into ways of being not defined by 
the ravages of domestication and the four alienations Karl Marx outlined 
in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.