On the Power of Politicising Depression During a Pandemic

On the 1st of May 2003, five women walked to Chicago’s government office wearing bathrobes. They were preparing for a demonstration; the first ‘Day of the Politically Depressed’. Onlookers began drifting toward the women, who were outnumbered by police in riot gear. An hour later, artist Vanalyne Green arrived in a taxi with a box of white T-shirts that read: “Depressed? It might be political!” Vanalyne is a founding member of Feel Tank, a collective project formed by women in response to their feelings of hopelessness about life in America. “We experience that as an individual feeling, but in fact, there’s something quite political about it,” Debbie Gould had told one of the curious police officers. The demonstration was light-hearted, but the message clear: “Instead of becoming apathetic, we should politicize our depression.”

Almost ten years after that demonstration on a drizzly day in Chicago, Ann Cvetkovich — a queer and Jewish gender studies professor — urged us to think about depression as a cultural and social phenomenon rather than a medical disease in her memoir-cum-critical-essay Depression: A public feeling. In opposition to the prevailing Western belief that mental illness is caused by a biochemical imbalance that can be corrected with medication, Cvetkovich positions depression as a rational reaction to stressors of an unstable and isolating neo-liberal, capitalist society.

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