Well Bottom Blues

Sunday Neurosis: Victor Frankl is thought to have coined the term Sunday Neurosis referring to a form of depression resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over.

Psychology Wiki.

Saturday’s are my least favorite day of the week. Allowed to just sit and drink an extra cup of coffee and think is not particularly mentally healthy. Some people might sit and plan their spring garden or a summer vacation. For some ruminative people, it can end up in wondering what it’s all about. And that’s is not a healthy exercise in modern society.

I’m not suggesting that mental disorder is not real. My expression of Bi-Polar mania was very real. But what about generalized anxiety disorder, or depression? I considered going off of my SSRI anti-depressant in part because I don’t believe I ever exhibited all the required symptoms for a formal diagnosis. I used to tell a past practitioner (aka pill doctor) that I suffered from anhedonia profoundly enough to have looked up the term. I also told him and every other psychological or psychiatric practitioner I’ve seen that given the contemporaneous events of my life, I would be some sort of sociopath not to be depressed.

I may also have a disposition toward generalized anxiety disorder. I told my primary physician in the late 2000s that I recognized the racing heart and tightness in my chest that accompanied feeling of anxiety. She had a cardiologist check me out and put my on Klonopin. But I think it was significant that I recognized it as a life-long condition, exacerbated at that time by many of the external stressors that led to toward periods of a listless anhedonia and eight years of SSRIs.

The question I have is what role those external stressors had in my expression of what modern psychopharmacology quickly pigeon-holed as a mental disorder requiring chemical intervention? I started therapy, which might have addressed how I handled those stressors, but I had no health insurance at the time and couldn’t afford to keep it up. Instead I ponied up for a private “mindful” psychiatrist who was incredibly helpful in dealing with anxiety and getting me off Klonopin. He was also the first to tell me he was diagnosing Bi-Polar II disorder, unlike the pill doctor who just suggested I try some lamotrigine without explaining why.

I was a painfully shy and bookish child, often teased and bullied. I only started to come out of my shell not through some healthy blossoming but through the use of alcohol and other drugs in my teens. If hell is other people, that pretty much describes by youth. Anxiety seems like a perfect normal reaction to threatening circumstances, and when diagnosed as a disorder is often described as an inappropriate flight-or-flight response. I’m not sure my early life experience of anxiety was inappropriate. But it established a pattern of how I dealt with the world around me.

I believe I have a possibly-generic disposition toward bi-polar disorder characterized largely by hypomania. I question whether my experience of anxiety and depression were of the same character as my bi-polar disorder. Were my not particularly extraordinary experiences in life conditioning me toward anxiety or depression, particularly anxiety? And how might my own experience relate to the seeming epidemic of diagnoses and prescriptions for conditions like anxiety and depression?

The idea that modern society created much of what is diagnosed as mental illness is not a new one. All the old certainties of who we are and how we behave have been stripped away. Would a quiet and bookish child have taken religious orders to escape an unpredictable but observably hostile world a hundred years ago? My experience of a Catholic religious education certainly exposed me to many individuals who clearly escaped into religious life to handle their socially-discouraged sexuality or other quirks of personality.

Much of modern American life is based on ideas of cowboy individuality which eschew any sense of community, and on a belief in a righteous meritocracy that any study of social and economic outcomes by postal code quickly disproves. We have torn down all the structures of community that supported us as human for millenia, and erected nothing to replace them. Corporate culture tries to bind us as individuals to our work identity, but the culture of my home New Orleans is not the mythical protestant work ethic. We work to live; we do not live to work. So much more in our rich culture identifies us in ways that what we do for a living never will. What we do for a living. That phrase expresses it perfect. It’s not an identify. It is just a necessity. So much of that seems purposeless in retrospect on a ruminative Saturday morning. Consider the long commute that the pandemic proved is not only environmentally disastrous but unnecessary. So much of modern work would be done remotely from a place of our choosing, whether that is at home or a beach in Costa Rica or a cabin in the Rocky Mountains. What prevents this? The economic structures of downtown real estate and business that depend upon the commute into the office.

Why do we go into the office? Being in such an undemocratic social situation gives an opportunity for those of a bullying nature, the believers in their American exceptionalism and the mythical meritocracy, a place to lord it over others. It is not the cream that rises to the top. It is the people who misunderstand animal behavior but stylize themselves as “alphas.” This no doubt gives them great satisfaction, but is it healthy for everyone else? We are trained for this world in out youth like circus animals, indoctrinated into a society based on hierarchal rules and conformity.

This is unhealthy generally for the average Joe and Jane. They throw themselves into the house and and yard chores and children’s’ activities, not considering that the 40-hour week was based on the assumption that one partner would stay at home to do many of these things. And they revel in a Saturday night of streaming movies or a Sunday football game as the reward for their work week. Come Sunday night, they wonder why they didn’t have a moment to just rest, and feel anxiety about repeating the unhealthy cycle. Of course they do, and so was have Sunday neurosis, another disorder to put in the book and find a way to treat.

I’m old enough to remember the anti-psychiatry movement of the early 1970s, the belief that it suppressed normal human expression outside of a narrow-conceived societal normal. What anti-psychotic would Jesus have required to treat his delusions? I reject that view in part because some people clearly have disorders that appear to be genetic in nature, such as bi-polar disorder. One common feature of my reading of late is the family tree of famous artistic maniacs with its grey and black bocks of relations and ancestors with similar symptoms, some Xed out to indicate suicide. My question is how much of the current “epidemic” of mental disorder is due to failure in the past to diagnose some individuals with a medically-explicable depression or anxiety, and how much is a normal increase in expression in a disordered society? And to what extent has an industry grown up around this societal–not individual–disorder to create and dispense Soma to make us happy citizens, praise Ford, of this brave new world?