The Hilarious World of Depression

by John Moe

To pull off that best case would mean trafficking in some psychotherapy clichés like finding your happy place or resolving mother issues. These are terms dragged out when someone wants to make fun of therapy. In popular thinking, imagining a happy place in order to help your brain is a denial of reality. This is a common way to dismiss mental illness and to dismiss possible ways to address it. This thinking often comes from the same people who believe that the best way to treat depression is to “snap out of it” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” These are the same people who will bemoan “political correctness” when asked to treat those different from themselves with at least a minimum of politeness. Their mockery, their eye-rolling, and their scorn are, to my way of thinking, the result of being taught the same discriminatory perspectives shared by the people who raised them.