Shiva, from Biodiverse Resistance is blowing my mind with new idea’s again. I have to process what he says about euthenasia and assisted suicide a bit more before I write about that, but this paragraph caught my eye:

There is a point here relating to depression and how it gets conceptualised – the prevailing view in mainstream/”establishment” discourse seems to be that depression is “endogenous”, or a result of chemical abnormalities within the individual brain, whereas a social model or “personal is political” viewpoint would argue that it is more likely to be caused by oppressive and unacceptable social conditions, whether at a home/family/immediate surroundings level or at a wider systemic level. However, like with most iterations of the “nature vs. nurture” debate, I don’t find the position held by some antipsychiatrists that all depression is social in origin useful – there is solid evidence that, in some cases, depression does have a clearly biological origin, and in some of those cases, it is treatable by biochemical means (an obvious example being gender dysphoria and the extremely high success rate of treating it with hormones and surgery, as opposed to the extremely low success rate of “treating” it with “normalisation” therapy – in fact, most attempts at the latter end in suicide).

I have nothing to add, really. Just that I think Shiva is awesome, and fabulous.