And I do believe whole towns can be collectively depressed psychologically like it’s a local dialect. If you have a fairly isolated community, and people maladapt to their internal psychological stress by drinking or willfully numbing themselves in other ways, porn or gambling or whatever, and there’s a dwindling supply of hope, people get swept along, and they wake up and they’re old and the world has passed them by. And most of the time their kids never see anyone get better, so they grow up with no idea how it happens or what it looks like.
