Politics and depression. Unless you’re talking economics, you usually don’t hear these two things discussed together, but, from my own personal experience, these two concepts are inseparable. Few things have jointly impacted my life the way politics and depression have done so.
When I arrived at UW Madison in the fall of 1999, I was a typical know-it-all freshman. Coming from small-town central Wisconsin, concepts of diversity, multiculturalism and campus climate had no real meaning to me. I was just another uninvolved and admittedly blissfully ignorant freshman. All I wanted to do was find good parties and get good enough grades to just get by. I had spent all of my life being an overachiever, and I figured that this, college, was my pay-off.
From the very beginning, it wasn’t going to be that simple. For starters, I had the misfortune to be roommates with a raging College Republican who eventually moved out because, among other things, my friends and I enjoyed the occasional drink, I ate too many Pokey Sticks and I had girls spend the night in our room.
Second semester rolled around, and basically, so did I. Thanks to the party kids living at 408 N. Frances that year, I pretty much spent my entire semester smoking copious amounts of herb, sleeping on the floor or playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater. The extent of my involvement in the University was being the president of the Chadbourne Smokers Interest Group (the SIG, for short).
The summer after my freshman year was basically a blur. I rarely emerged from my summer sublet, venturing out only to buy the occasional pack of smokes. I isolated myself from the outside world and little by little, I sank into the depths of depression.
What turned my life around started out with the frustration of watching the Democratic and Republican National Conventions on TV that summer. My litmus test for presidential candidates involved funding for the arts and decriminalization of cannabis, and the two major parties failed miserably in those departments. I was getting pretty peeved that I couldn’t find someone good to vote for in November, so I consulted the wellspring of truth that is the Internet. Lo and behold, my interests matched me with the Green Party.
I was stunned. All my life, politics was something stupid and detached from real people, discussed only in the context of Democrats versus Republicans. My interest was piqued, and I dedicated myself to finding ways to educate myself and those around me about politics. As luck would have it, when classes started the next fall, I ran into an old friend of mine from high school that happened to be a student council member. I told her about my frustration that more people don’t know about the choices they have for the upcoming November elections, and she invited me up to the Associated Students of Madison’s office to see if I wanted to help out with voter education and registration.
I was impressed that ASM was bothering to register students to vote. Last time I did anything remotely involved with ASM, it was marching down State Street chanting “Ten percent! Fuck that!” and I had felt pretty silly. The next thing I knew, then-ASM chair Mike Dean had dumped the non-partisan Vote 2000 campaign on me, and I was helping to register thousands of students to vote. By stepping out of my comfort zone and helping out my fellow students, I had found meaning and purpose in my being at UW, and inevitably, the fog of depression that had so driven me mad was finally fading away.
In his book “Private Terror/Public Life,” James Glass came to the conclusion that mental illness is an inherently political event. Whereas politics is the complex of relations between people living in a society, mental illness such as depression acts as a form of oppression, removing people from interpersonal relationships and societal interaction. By actively combating this oppression, by stepping outside of my comfort zone and by investing myself in the university community, I experienced firsthand the strange and inseparable relationship between politics and depression.
