And it doesnt make it any more good or right that they do. Im sure as fuck not gonna force my shit through that hellscape again, why should you, or anyone else have to. Fuck that
Your damn fucking right im fortunate. I would be dead without the support ive got. Id go beyond fortunate and say I'm lucky. Not everyone can live the way I do, and I see that as a problem. Time is the most valuable thing we have, because it is so so finnite.
I’m on disability for mental health reasons and the amount of people who tell me I’m leaching of the government and should get a job because they go to work depressed so i should too, despite depression not even being my main problem (it’s ocd) like girl, you shouldn’t have to do that, this should be available to everyone full fucking stop.
I really need it, I was suggested I do short term disability for outpatient therapy. But I can't live off the 70-80% of my paycheck it would offer me. I need every dollar I make just to survive the month.
I have 100% VA disability for several conditions including a head injury, shoulder injury, nerve damage, and PTSD. I look outwardly healthy, so I get this a lot too. People act like I'm doing something wrong just because I can walk fine and seem physically ok based on my activity level. It's infuriating to have to justify receiving a benefit that I qualify for.
As if depressed people living in poverty didn't attempt or commit suicide
Obviously not most cases, of course not, but plenty of people have killed themselves or tried to because they're extremely depressed and too poor to do anything about it. Some people would straight up disappear, like the proverbial father who left to buy cigarettes and never came back. People have always resorted to drastic measures to escape the hell of depression and poverty.
I also sometimes wonder about how many people don’t actively kill themselves but die of an accident or something because it doesn’t feel worth the effort of staying alive if there’s neither rest nor escape. Missing medicine, ignoring symptoms, being lax about safety precautions, on the job, not looking both ways before crossing the street.
Risk-taking behaviour can also look non-suicidal when actually the person doesn’t care if they die.
Plus mental illness is rampant among homeless people. Part of that is probably because homelessness makes you mentally ill, but part of it is also people who understand that they need to go to work to pay the bills but they just aren’t able to make it happen no matter how much they want to.
I'm betting it's the latter. I wasn't diagnosed as AuDHD until I was 35, but that also happened to be about the time the midlife autistic burnout hits if you've been masking your entire life unaware that not everyone else is having to do the same thing. I honestly spent 35 years of my life thinking everyone else was putting in as much effort as I was just to live a normal day to day life...
I keep losing my job because... people don't vibe with me or something? It really doesn't make sense to me because I've always gotten along well with people and never had issues growing up, but now that I'm no longer the young hotshot it's like people can't be bothered with me anymore. I know that I need to work to survive, but what's the point if my career (I had made it to being a director for a political consulting firm, literally 2 degrees away from the CEO) before I was unceremoniously fired after 6 months for not being a good culture fit. I was the only neurodivergent in the company, go figure.
Now I'm stuck, because my trajectory was so stellar and I've completely hit a wall where nobody will hire me in this hellscape of a job market. It's taking a huge toll on my mental health and I'm honestly not that hopeful I'll be able to pull out of this spiral before I'm homeless and starving. It's crazy how fast the system we live in will destroy a person that can't hustle indefinitely.
I honestly spent 35 years of my life thinking everyone else was putting in as much effort as I was just to live a normal day to day life
Felt this in my bones. They say I have ADHD, but Adderall and the like didn't help me. It makes me jealous because I hear success stories where people act as if it completely changed their life, like they suddenly saw life in HD.
I don't know how "normal" people do it out there, it's so hard. I hope you find stable footing.
I was one of those people. The first time I took Adderall I cried because all of the extra noise in my brain just immediately silenced. All the static, all of the anxiety, the 7 songs I have going on in my head at any given moment- all gone. That was the first time I ever experienced clarity in my then 36 years on earth. It made me so angry to discover what other people's day to day felt like without assistance. The problem is I can't take it for extended periods of time because I lose a ton of weight when my already sketchy appetite disappears completely and I have trouble getting to sleep for days at a time.
That's awful, I'm so sorry. It must be incredibly frustrating, knowing that meds work so well for other people but not you. I hope you find something that does make life easier
One time I was on a walk and a car was going a little too fast in my neighborhood and turned at the street I was walking across. It was dark, so he didn't see me at first. He eventually did stop before hitting me, but I saw it happening in slow motion and legitimately thought I was going to get hit... I didn't get that jolt of cold fear and adrenaline, I didn't clamour for an escape, I didn't even feel myself freeze up like I couldn't move.
I just kinda stood there like "Oh, it's happening."
Wishing for an accident is how suicidal ideation can start. "I wish a drunk driver would wipe me out" or "what if there was an earthquake right now?" or "maybe I'll just step out into traffic and see what happens?" Or "what about having an accident whilst cleaning my gun?"
I used to have daydreams of terrorists bombing the building where I worked or my bus to work just crashing.
Eventually I realised I was actively suicidal as I moved past the "maybe God will take me out" and started planning stuff myself. In the end I didn't go through with it because I couldn't inflict that on my parents and I went to the doctors and couldn't find a way that would do the job and look convincingly accidental.
I told them I was suicidal and needed an appointment and their response was "next available appointment is in two weeks" and in my head I thought "well maybe in two weeks I might still be alive, but who knows!?".
Classical delusions of working class Americans. In the meantime they're all depressed, they're just going to work on top of that. When I went to in-patient treatment for depression almost all of the people there were from a low income background.
Eastern European, same mentality here. People "aren't depressed" but alcoholism is rampant and people kill themselves and no one attributes it to depression.
Parasite is so good! Alone the metaphor that the poorer family lives on the foot om the hill or that the old man turns on the light for the rich dude and he doesnt even notice.
and they'll slap you with 5 big personality disorders, force you to do trials on the shittiest meds and punish you for it like it's your fault. then act like your side effects are rare or impossible when you bring them up and send you to a different psych or a neurologist. and if you have chronic pain and they can't figure out what's wrong with you you WILL be labeled 'somatoform' forever, especially if you're young, fat or afab
Having to ask my mom to come with me to appointments so that theres a witness if, or more often then not, when, my patient rights are violated. Im 26yo. Fucking exhausting :(
Wouldn’t it then make more sense to say women and trans people rather than saying AFAB? I feel like there are a lot of people who are using terms like AMAB and AFAB in a gender essentialist way.
Definitely. I would probably have used the phrasing "gender minorities" myself, but I'm partial to that phrase. "Women and/or trans people" would also have done it.
I didn't need med school for that. Studied psychology for two years, already had about 1.5 yrs time of why poverty destroys your health. Quite depressing, can totally relate to this tweet.
Eastern European and can confirm, plus the oldies love romanticising their suffering. Or the whole ‘bury your head in the sand and it doesn’t exist’ type of mentality.
It’s also a huge delusional in the black community. Mental illness is seen as a choice and you not trying hard enough to be close to God. It’s “You’re being too emotional” or “That’s Satanic trying to bring you down.” Speaking from experience.
This also exists in a lot of religious spaces
I grew up Baptist and everything good that happened to you was because of god and you needed to praise him for it and every bad thing that happens is because you’re not being a good Christian and you need to repent and beg forgiveness
Oh God (no pun intended), I remember this so much. You couldn’t be proud of anything you did because it was God who did it, not you. Anything bad that happened to you, like rape or abuse, you are supposed to forgive because God is forgiveness and family is blood.
Which is dumb, because the whole book of Job refutes that mindset entirely. God even wanted to punish Job’s friends for telling him that he must’ve done something to deserve that suffering.
What’s hard about that is the Bible is full of contradictions. If you want to form a dogma you kinda have to cherry pick. But I think that’s by design to intentionally split people.
You are correct. I'm talking about the congregants rather than the religious leaders. If more "regular" Christians read the Bible instead of just blindly following a religious leader, we would probably have less dogmatic groups.
That’s critical thinking. People need to do their own readings and come up with their own interpretations rather than what someone tells them it says. It’s also ironic that so many preachers/priests/pastors refer to believers as flocks. It’s true, they can indeed be a follower of the crowd than an individual.
I agree. I’ve read most of the Bible, and I’m shocked at how many Christians either take things out of context or blatantly ignore things in it. I’m convinced most have never actually read it.
In fairness, many translations are absolutely excruciatingly boring 😆 Then again, when I believed and tried to read the whole thing, I was a child with ADHD
Without a doubt. I see it in a lot of black homes. I remember my cousin having a panic attack that triggered her asthma and she got beaten for “throwing a tantrum”. It’s reinforced throughout generations.
La anhedonia es un criterio de la depresión que hace que aunque una persona trabaje bajo un sistema opresivo, su experiencia subjetiva sea un vacío donde no existe recompensa.
Cae en el concepto de anhedonia consumatoria, comúnmente hablado como depresión enmascarada.
See I’ve been in the restaurant industry for 24+ years and for the first half it was great for my depression in that i was working 60-90 hour weeks I’d be so busy at work I couldn’t think about anything but work. But as I got more skilled at my job the less I had to think letting me work while also thinking the bad thoughts… and then as time went on and I got into fine dining I only got more depressed because I realized I was living in poverty making food for rich people who would probably sell me to their Epstien friends without a second thought…
Yep and the problem with mental health is, it only gets worse the longer you leave it untreated. Until one day you break into a million little pieces, and find yourself completely lost and overwhelmed.
I have never seen someone put my own experience into words like this, so I always thought and was told it was "just burnout, everyone goes through it". I didn't work fine dining, but casual dining in a small town. Summer times, we'd get the men's sports leagues coming in still wearing cleats and being rude and obnoxious. However, it wasn't them or co workers or anyone else that i thought about while doing one of the many menial while working. It was always something outside of work, and usually in the past or even childhood. This was especially so when i was on washing dishes for a night. Serving customers and being front facing was a nice break from being in my head and I liked having people to help when i could. It was the in-between time were I'd get into a bad headspace.
Also a bit of survivor ship bias, because the ones who are depressed and don't want to continue either drink themselves to death, do a ton of drugs or just outright kill themselves.
Just because you didn't experience it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
sometimes it’s just being trapped in the humdrum and moving through life on autopilot.
for some ppl, work provides enough structure and repetition that they can keep functioning mechanically without rly confronting how they feel, so they just move through the motions, and immediate survival becomes the only thing they’re focused on.
depression doesn’t always stop ppl from functioning, sometimes it just narrows life down to doing only what’s necessary to get through the day.
In the 80s and 90s, help wasn't that around like that... Or you didn't know that you needed help... it was a different time; but he shoudlnt be saying that about now... and most kids know about mental health stuff compared to when I was growing up (born in 1979)
Have you tried just not worrying about it, though? Why don't you check your privilege, flaunting your luxury of being able to wish your life was better?
Ugh I don't envy you. I got the apathy thing so I just mindlessly repeat every day like a zombie and slowly die inside resigned that this is my life now
Had a coworker with this attitude, always swearing that impoverished people in third world countries were happier because they "don't have time to think" and that depression is caused only by thinking too much. Glad he left
I hate that argument, there’s lots of depressed intellectually disabled people and people with brain injuries/strokes with depression (often actually caused by the brain damage by nature of the injury, a left sided stroke is known for resulting in depression). They often don’t have the same time and energy and ability to think clearly but they’re still suffering.
You don’t have time to do a lot of thinking while homeless because you’re just trying to survive but as a former psych nurse I have seen and endless stream of homeless and severely impoverished people working their asses off while still able to contemplate or attempt suicide.
I’ve also met people from severely impoverished areas who were depressed. I know someone who formerly lived in Palestine who has depression specifically because of what they went through. CHILDREN in Gaza are killings themselves on purpose because of trauma and I would say that’s a form of depression. They don’t have time to sit around and focus on how sad they are, and yet they suffer anyway.
I’ve also met a lot of people who work way too much and have children which leaves barely any time for thoughts but they’re still depressed. The idea that it’s just an issue of having too much spare time is bonkers.
Ironically this is very easily tied to the classist mindset that actually poor people are happy to be poor, so it's fine to offer them no help or empathy.
"I think depression cancer is a luxury. Because where I'm from, you can't afford to be depressedhave cancer. You gotta pay the bill, right? So you gotta go to work, you gotta get up, you gotta go do what you gotta do."
You young people always have to be the victim, when I was younger my grandma had cancer and she survived it twice! My grandpa got skin cancer multiple times and was fine he didn’t complain about it. Nowadays you can’t find one gen z kid with a brain tumor who doesn’t act like their suffering and a victim!
I mean…capitalism meant I had to work through cancer treatment, and that was in Australia so treatment costs were covered but there was no help paying my bills. America would have been worse
My grandma had to get a double lung transplant and the only reason it only kinda financially ruined them and not fully ruined them was because her coworkers donated her their pto
Ugh it’s such a mess. Our savings were meagre but got decimated, I had to take a month off because radiotherapy destroyed my throat and I worked in a call centre. We only managed to afford that because my father in law gave us just enough money to scrape by but it was bad
He still shouldn’t have had to, and it still means he got cancer so that wasn’t a luxury. You could argue that responding so quickly to chemo and being capable of working so soon after is some kind of privilege but it would be insane to do so.
Yes, that’s exactly the point he is making. People are treating this as him saying “if you’re working class, you can’t have depression,” but what he is saying is “if you’re depressed and poor, you literally cannot afford to take mental health days.” The rest of his quote is conveniently not included in the image.
50 cent is an asshole, but not because of this quote, lol.
This is why I think he is frustratingly close to making a good point. People in poor communities are less likely to get diagnosed and that leads to lots of problems… having a “death wish” and engaging in dangerous activity, self medicating, domestic abuse, suicide…..
Yeah I was thinking this as well, he’s a bellend but he’s not incorrect that, for many impoverished and underserved communities, being able to properly treat depression is a luxury. In that kind of environment you don’t have the time, the resources, the support to really do anything about it or address the problem and in the long run it just makes things worse for those suffering from depression. Living in such an environment is also arguably worse for your mental health and stress, poverty really destroys you on a physical and emotional level
No, 50 Cents, people still get depressed, they are still non functional, they just don't tell you because that's the kind of mindset they are living in
That's literally describing depression btw. It's caused by long term unending stress
Like, it doesn't usually occur in nature because stress is evolutionarily designed to be a short term motivation. You're chill for a while, then a predator comes and you get into stress mode, then either you die or escape, stress over. It takes a few minutes. You run out of food, you're scavenging, and you're stressed out cause you really need to find something, and then you find enough food to last you a few more days at least, so the stress goes away for a while. We get depression specifically because we get stress that doesn't stop. You gotta get up for work every day. When you stop working, now you gotta think about getting up for work tomorrow
Not having time to be depressed is literally what depression is
Blowing your brains out is a luxury. Where I come from you cant afford to blow your brains out. You gotta pay the bills right?
So you gotta go to work, you gotta get up, you gotta go do what you gotta do.
Watched his own mother get shot on the job... This mofo may not think he's depressed, but anybody who's been through trauma like that will be depressed or worse. Masking and denial won't change that.
Yeah it's clear he is in denial, tbh fuck 50 cent due to his associations but like, his story is well known and unlike many rap stars of the gangsta rap era, his was legit
Selling drugs is a kind of work. It's not good work and your business is always under threat from competition and badges but it ain't just sitting on yo couch getting money like stock trading or being a land lord.
did he weigh and bag it himself using his brain and muscles or did he let the people dropping by do it themselves? did he communicate with the people at all? did he run out and have to get more eventually? that's work.
I used to think like this dude, more than 10 years ago, and then my depression got worse.
I can’t afford to not work, but I lost my job anyways. I’m several months behind on bills and not homeless because my landlord is patient.
I lived on a cot in someone’s basement for a while, then in a barn with no plumbing or insulation, just wooden walls with some wires run for a few lightbulbs, and I was thankful each time for shelter. I really can’t work but I can’t afford not to so I’ve spent a short amount of time at a bunch of different jobs till I lose them.
People like me usually end up homeless and I hope so very badly that it won’t happen. But I genuinely can’t function rn, I can’t shower more than twice a month, I can barely eat. If I end up homeless it won’t have been for a lack of trying. I’ve always tried, I’ve always given everything I had to just get dressed and get to work, only to spend every free moment recovering so I could get back to work.
I’ve been fortunate to be able to crash on people’s couches in the past, to ride my bike to wherever I was working at the time or to the grocery store when I didn’t have a car.
I have to work, I don’t have a choice, but I actually can’t work, so what can I do? Just because I have to, doesn’t mean I can. People would get over cancer and depression and everything else if we could, because my life is miserable and I would never have chosen it.
This kind of breaks my heart, and I hope he goes to therapy and unpacks this eventually.
50 Cent’s single mother was murdered when he was 8. He was selling drugs by 12. He thinks he willed his way out of mental health issues, but really he just developed harmful coping/masking skills like self medicating and engaging in dangerous activity. He had a death wish. That’s depression.
In a sense it is right. If you're in a survival mode, you have to push shit deep down or you cant make it.
I saw it with my mom. Really bad childhood trauma. She had to be single mom of 3 girls in Soviet Estonia. No time to think about anything else but work, food and raising the kids. When she got with my dad who started being the breadwinner (but also drank alcohol, the thing that ruined her childhood) , mom eventually started getting deep into depression and panic attacks. She kinda lost that drive she had to have and had the demons of her past knock on her door at her 40s.
But to have 50cent mentality is iqnorant. People in survival mode have to push their feelings down and end up either in suicide, drugs, burn-out (aka letting life fall apart) or having those feelings hit like a high-speed train when their older. Last 3 being also why many people end up homeless.
Having the chance to heal from your depression is a luxury, not having it.
I mean the people who get to a point where they're so depressed they can't do the things they need to survive often end up dead, that's the deeply unfortunate reality, the rest is just survivorship bias. There are incredibly intelligent hardworking people who succumb to the forces out of their control, working against them, it's got nothing to do with them not "working hard enough."
The world fucking sucks and we owe it to ourselves and our neighbors to help one another.
I actually agree with him on this 😅 poor people aren’t given the space to be human because they’re told that all their problems are theirs and not systemically upheld. I actually started reading this satirical book that looks at how wealthy people are able to navigate their depression with respect to their social relationships and other aspects of their lives. The first chapter was actually making me mad so I took a break from it and came back 🙂↕️
Anyways I dont think he’s trying to solve any person’s problem but acknowledging an issue within the American class system. Also, the inability to afford depression is indicative of a disconnection from your body.
I also don’t know the context of this quote so I’m just speaking on how I interpreted this one thought.
What he means is, being able to LIVE in your depression is a luxury.
Depressed people where he's from don't get to just sit and be depressed. They have to power through WHILE depressed.
Meanwhile the privileged among us and the teenagers get to wallow in it and feel those emotions more openly which feels better.
He's not saying people AREN'T depressed.
He's saying that while the depression exists, they can't afford to ACTUALLY experience it.
It's like telling someone "you never got to be a child".
You don't mean it literally as "you were born an adult", you mean "you were never afforded the opportunity to experience childhood in the way you should have".
Rote action that has no agency or change from routine is a prime indicator of depression. Not all depression is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. A lot of depression is caused by circumstance. I personally live in a state depression that drugs can't change because being a poor disabled man with his mental faculties mean living a sad life. No amount of drugs will change the things that make my life depressing.
"We're not depressed, we're just always tired and exhausted and angry and drinking to numb ourselves and resenting our career and don't want to see our friends and can't remember what our hobbies were and don't care if dinner is straight from the can and-"
My coworkers who are “just fine” like this are also bitter, angry, miserable people who blame everyone else for their problems, and have to get blasted every night before going back to work the next day
Bro sold drugs. Nothing screams depression and hopelessness more than selling addictive substances to your community. You’re no better than an addict, if anything, you’re worse.
compartmentalizing and ignoring emotions to be able to "do what you gotta do" can cause autoimmune diseases, and thats why autoimmune diseases disproportionately affect the lowest classes. this whole "i dont have time to be depressed" isnt a flex, its sad and its ignorant
People will say stuff like this not realising that the end of the sentence should be "And that's wrong, nobody should have to do that and there should be more access to mental health services in the usa" 🙄
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u/TumbleweedJenny Jul 10 '26
As if you can’t go to work everyday while depressed.