Our culture is built on control, productivity, and appearance—and anxiety and depression defy all three.
To be anxious is to be porous, uncertain, unable to self-regulate in a way others find comfortable.
To be depressed is to step out of the social contract of striving, self-optimization, and performance.
Both challenge the myth that the individual is sovereign, rational, and self-determining.
People minimize and stigmatize these states because they don’t fit the dominant moral economy, which equates worth with output, emotional neatness, and resilience. In that frame, if you’re not doing, not managing, not performing stability, you must be defective or unwilling.
Calling someone lazy is often a defensive reaction—it lets others distance themselves from what scares them. If they can label it moral failure, they don’t have to confront the possibility that suffering is systemic, that they are complicit or that they too could fall apart.
There’s also a deep historical legacy here: The protestant work ethic, neoliberal individualism and ableism all play a role.
1. Policy: Bureaucratic Cruelty and Moral Judgments
Modern mental health policy, especially in neoliberal states, often operates under the guise of care but embeds moral suspicion:
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Welfare systems require constant proof that you’re sick enough not to work, but not too sick to be beyond help. It’s a catch-22 that criminalizes ambiguity.
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Workfare programs (e.g., mandatory job training for disability benefit recipients) operate on the assumption that you’re malingering unless coerced into productivity.
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Funding is often contingent on protocols which privilege quick fixes and behavioral compliance over lived experience or long-term support.
This system sees the anxious and depressed not as people in need of space and support but as liabilities to be monitored, corrected, and minimized.
2. Media: Spectacle of Resilience, Horror of Passivity
Media (especially self-help and social media) perform a double move:
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They glorify resilience—stories of triumph over adversity, “I beat depression and built a startup!” That aesthetic rewards the narrative arc of struggle → redemption → success.
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But they pathologize or erase ongoing suffering without resolution. Characters who linger in depression or anxiety without “improvement” are framed as tragic, failed, or cautionary.
Mainstream mental health messaging is often flattened: “Talk to someone,” “Get help,” “You are not alone.” These slogans imply access, responsiveness, and a linear recovery arc—when in fact many are structurally abandoned. The slogans hide the gap.
Media also depoliticize suffering. Anxiety becomes a personal flaw or a chemical glitch, not a response to untenable conditions (climate, debt, loneliness, overwork, surveillance).
3. Everyday Encounters: Social Distance and Moral Pressure
On the interpersonal level, stigma operates through impatience, misrecognition, and sometimes false empathy:
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The anxious person is seen as too much, needy, unpredictable, fragile.
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The depressed person is seen as not enough, lazy, dull, burdensome.
People want suffering to make sense—have a cause, a plan, and an end. When it doesn't, it becomes unbearable to witness. So others minimize it (“Just get outside”), moralize it (“You need to try harder”), or abandon it.
This mirrors what James Baldwin wrote: "The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim; he has become a threat." Unprocessed suffering disrupts social order. It refuses neat containment.
Taken Together
These three layers—the systemic, the symbolic, and the interpersonal—form a machine that turns distress into defect, then turns defect into moral failing. To be anxious or depressed under this regime is not just to suffer, but to carry the burden of proving your suffering is real, valid, and not your fault—again and again, inside a system that has already made up its mind.
GPT
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