Watched another show in the series. This one was about unemployment and hopelessness and how they affected health.
They illustrated with a town where the main business was a factory. People worked there, earning a good living, and then all of a sudden the company moved manufacturing to another country where they pay $1.50 an hour instead of $15 and benefits mean giving employees a free bus ride to work.
The loss of the factory was devastating to the town. Suddenly almost everyone was unemployed. People who had thought they would have a job forever suddenly had no good options. They could stay where they had built a home and put down roots and maybe find a job that paid minimum wage and had no benefits or they could start from scratch somewhere else (which is especially hard for those who are older and more established). The people in the town feel powerless. They realize that they are not in control of their lives. Some outside force can sweep away all they have built.
The people in the town had to accept their new circumstances. In a way that acceptance gave them peace, but it did not take away the feeling of powerlessness or hopelessness, which are major components of depression. When i think of depression I tend to think of depression without cause, but depression with cause has the same effect.
They went on to explore how other countries handle mass lay-offs, and how there is a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, particularly in this country. The gap in this country is greater than any in any other developed country in the world.
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You know how you can know something and yet not KNOW it? (And how you can KNOW something and still, every once in a while run across something that makes you KNOW it again?)
The show was interesting and informative… But it also made me think of myself because many of the feelings they were talking about are the same feelings i have had, to one extent or another, for most, perhaps all, of my life. I resist thinking of my feelings as depression, but no matter what the root cause or what name you put in it, when you feel powerless, the effect is the same! I suppose that was the “ah-ha” for me… that the effects are the same… particularly when one woman was talking about her weight gain, and then self-medicating with food and alcohol was discussed.
Of course the effects are the same! No matter what you call cause, depression or feeling powerless, you feel the same way, and you do the same things to feel better. I had not really thought of it that way.
Just interesting
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(I have rewritten this 3 or 4 times, trying to say what i want to say without getting off on some tangent. Even now i am not so much satisfied with it as i am tired of messing with it. I am going to post. So, if you are reading along and suddenly something does not make sense or there is a lack of flow….. it is because of all the rewrites. I am so tired of it now that i am tempted not to post at all…. but then there would be all that time spent for nothing!)
