this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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me_irl
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TL;DR: The world wasn’t made for the minority that classify as having a mental illness.
My answer to this question comes with the inherent bias of not being in a minority myself, but I have personally found myself at the bottom for the majority of my life due to my own actions. Things only got better when I changed.
That is not to say change is easy or accessible for everyone or even most. I know many people in my life that I don’t know what to recommend for them in the current state of affairs other than to prepare for it to get worse. But on the flipside, I know far more that whine and complain about their current situation and have every opportunity to change it. Those are the people that I feel fit calmly in the 75%.
I have a crackpot theory with only vague experience to back it up, but here it is: Have you ever been to Vegas? Or really any major city mall? When you go there, if it’s a good mall, the only ones still around are fashion malls. And you’ll see hundreds of people walking around with bags upon bags worth of stuff. There’s just all this money moving all around. Every. Single. Day. Who are these people? When you start paying attention, the vast majority just seem to blend in with the rest, taking on almost a general image of what might be “a person”.
But then there’s almost a separate crowd from them. Just like you reading this now. You can pick them out. I can’t give you words, but they are clearly people who have been through THE SHIT. There’s those of us who have and those of us who haven’t. Almost everyone I’ve encountered on Lemmy has been through THE SHIT. We all know what it is. And the moment you find yourself I an accidental conversation with someone who hasn’t, it’s immediately noticeable.
The 75% may potentially have a mental illness as we would think about it. But they’ve never had something bring it far enough to the surface for anyone to cast them out for it. I truly feel that a lot of what Hollywood portrays in the terrible characters they create comes down to a reflection of real people. Without THE SHIT, you don’t have a nearly as much of a chance of truly empathizing with those that have.
Feel free to find a massive flaw in my theory. I’m not a sociologist in the slightest.
Edit: hit save too soon
To circle back, it was only after coming out of it and realizing that I had to change and that the system never would that I managed to bring myself out of my 10-year depression. Not is just in the form of masking and managing my emotions more effectively. Not everyone gets that opportunity due to the oppressiveness of the society around them.
Everyone I know has been through some shit. I'm not positive I understand what THE SHIT is, so maybe I'm one of the ones where it would be noticeable.
If you're talking about depression, I have not been through that. I've helped people cope or get out of it though.
Even the people I've known who grew up wealthy, have had hardships like people dying, horrible parents, depression etc. One of my friends that grew up wealthy had a dad that went to prison and the family lost everything. You would never know any of that if you met them, they looked like a happy, upper middle class person.
I bring up the wealth because even our super duper billionaires with all of the healthcare accessible to them, look like miserable high schoolers at bad parties. This is not a healthy society in any way.
I think this is because, despite all the wealth, these people never grew up beyond the emotional and mental levels of a high schooler. They never had to face any consequences for their actions, surrounded by yes-men their entire lives, and so developed narcissistic traits to go along with their stunted emotional maturity. And so any little interruption to their lives is cause for a major meltdown while they try to fill the gnawing void that the spoiled childhood of emotionally absent parents they never outgrew left in them.
This is precisely the conclusion I came to at the Mormon finance firm I worked at for awhile. They literally still sat at those long fold-out lunch tables with the circular seats attached. Everyone in their little cliques, but eating lunch "together." Events and activities clearly inspired by youth group. It was surreal, at times.