Depression is a contemporary illness that follows from too much positivity, says the essayist

Essay

Jaakko Vuori: The return of melancholy. Researchers’ Association. 57 pp.

Depression is considered one of the biggest health problems of our time. Hundreds of thousands of Finns take antidepressants. Many recognize the symptoms of depression in themselves, whether diagnosed or not.

No two depressed people necessarily have the same symptoms. According to some experts, the title covers many different states of mind.

It is therefore a wide-reaching, vague phenomenon. Exactly the kind that you can think about critically.

Doctor of Social Sciences Jaakko Vuori thinks in his essay The Return of Melancholy depression, or at least some of its forms, as a chronic disease. The essay belongs to the new Para series of the Association of Researchers. It publishes theoretical texts between the length of an article and a book.

Vuori’s approach is familiar from continental philosophy and critical theory. Psychological symptoms such as depression are considered social phenomena.

Mountain writes about the depression of the new middle class that is characteristic of modern times. Even a hundred years ago, too much striving for normality made people sick. There was a list of prohibitions that had to be obeyed. Violating the boundaries they set led to guilt, which started a downward spiral.

Today’s depressed person does not feel guilty for breaking boundaries, but for neglecting their opportunities. Inadequacy is the problem. “The reason for guilt is that you are not able to test your limits, the reason for shame is that you still feel shame,” Vuori puts it.

The reason for the problem is the demand for positivity. The new middle class of young adults drifts into melancholy when they experience a lack of self-determination and initiative. They are considered resources, the lack of which leads to inferiority.

A typical way of explaining states like depression in our time is to classify them as disorders of brain function. Vuori quotes French sociology Alain Ehrenbergaccording to which cognitive neuroscience is one of the great narratives of individualism of our time. Neuroscience paints a picture of the human individual with latent potential. Because our brains are plastic, our limits as individuals are unknown. From this point of view, a depressed person suffers from a lack of plasticity.

Creative the experience of the middle class is expressed in fiction and TV drama, both in Finland and in other Western countries. Vuori critically reads Finnish autofictional literature. For example Harry Salmenniemen Shadow consciousness (Siltala, 2023) aims to make a parody of the melancholy of the new middle class, but despite its artistic values, in Vuori’s opinion, remains an expression of the same melancholy.

Vuori reads philosophy, sociology and fiction, and draws conclusions from what he reads that illuminate the density of our time. Even if one does not agree with the interpretations, the text creates thought spikes. At times, the argument progresses fragmentarily, and sometimes the repetition feels like an incomplete structure. The friction of reading still remains appropriate.

According to Vuori, one can see the culmination of a kind of capitalism in the ideal of self-realization. According to it, everything is an endless possibility. Everyone has to find their own thing and pursue their dreams.

Vuori points out that art is no longer a counterforce to the logic of such economic production. The creativity of art and the experimentalism of the avant-garde have merged into a part of the system of capitalism, into capital free from regulation.

However, the demand for positivity is ultimately a fantasy without which it would be possible to live. Just like the previous normality requirement was.