On loneliness caused by depression, and depression caused by loneliness

Not unrelated to Ukraine

Depression is something that people either understand as being out of the sufferer's control, or they don't. I wish I was in the second group of people, because to not understand it is presumably to have not experienced it. There's an awful lot of judgment towards depression, often boiling down to exasperated calls to "stop being so self-centred", to "pull yourself together", or that "it's all in your head". To a person suffering depression, none of these are helpful, but that sufferer would also probably not disagree with any of the points: Yes it is self-centred, Yes I know I need to pull myself together, Yes I know it’s all in my head. The nature of the condition is the crippling lack of energy to do anything about it.

Paradoxically, exercise is one of the best things to do to improve one's mood, but finding the motivation to do it gets harder the longer you abstain. Likewise, spending time with other people generally improves mood, but low mood decreases one's wish to socialise - from personal experience, I feel like I don't want to drag other people down, and I feel I don't have anything to say.

So why am I writing about depression on a blog about Ukraine? I've suffered from depression for much longer than the SMO has been going on, so I'm not suggesting it caused it, but also in the last year I have felt consistently lower than I have for a long time. A big reason for that has been the fracturing of relationships, both by other people's reactions to my insistence that the media is misinforming everyone about what's going on in Ukraine, and by my reactions to other people's open Russophobia. I simply feel like I'm living on a different plane of existence to everyone else, and the one on which everyone else is living seems to me so transparently built on lies, ignorance and hatred, that I can't seem to muster the desire to talk to these people - I've tried very hard already, and been shut down and ridiculed at every turn.

Coming up against the reality that groupthink is a very real phenomenon, and that most people are more inclined to believe what everyone else believes than to honestly examine any of those beliefs or discuss them, has robbed me of my ability to make small talk or socialise casually. I can't get over the fact that we are all expected to #StandWithUkraine and to believe that anything negative we might see or hear about Ukraine is by definition Russian propaganda, and that so many people are going along with it. The straw man arguments are so flimsy (e.g. "Russian media characterises all Ukrainians as Nazis", therefore there are no Nazis in Ukraine), and the incessant allegations of Russian atrocities so baseless and uncorroborated, but the sheer volume of them in mass media seems to have convinced a sizeable majority to believe them. After a year of this ongoing insult to our collective intelligence, I really struggle to respect people who continue to believe it, much less those who still proudly sport blue-and-yellow flags on social media or cheer every time there is news of a successful Ukrainian attack.

And that's where the loneliness comes in. I've retreated more and more into the online world, reading and listening to people who also see what's going on, and engaging with this media has begun to have a soothing, reassuring effect. I'm starting to find interacting in this online world more agreeable than having conversations in real life, which just seem to give me anxiety and make people think I've lost my mind. It's depressing that I'm so alone, but it's more depressing that I don't want to interact with other people. I don't know how to break out of this, and I don't like where these thoughts lead.

The thing that makes the situation feel so fabricated and unreal, is that it feels like a bizarre reflection of the isolation that came with COVID. For over a year we were told to avoid socialising, huge social pressure was put on us to comply with this, and people were abused, disparaged and even arrested for failure to comply. Then we were 'encouraged' to get a vaccine, again under huge social pressure, and those who refused were ostracised and shamed by many - even though now it seems that they were right to be sceptical of the safety of a vaccine to a new virus so soon after its development. Then, almost overnight, COVID restrictions were lifted and the media focus shifted to supporting Ukraine, and those who questioned this were, and continue to be, ostracised and ridiculed.

I went along with the first two demands but I resisted the third one, but I've been rejected by many people as if this scepticism proves that I am wrong about everything. This feels like totalitarianism, when questioning any aspect of a regime is tantamount to rejecting all of it. It's not pleasant being ostracised, but it does at least show you who the people ready to do the ostracising really are. As Caitlin Johnstone pointed out in her most recent post, if you’re depressed but can’t figure out why that is, you shouldn't discount the possibility that there are in fact just a lot of assholes around.