December 18, 2019:
There was generalized misunderstanding of mental illness.
I don't remember people talking seriously of depression until the late 1980s,
after Prozac revolutionized popular consciousness.
Before then mental illness was taboo.
You'd lose your job, you'd lose your friends,
where the movie in everyone's head was of straightjackets and electroshock.
It was Frances Farmer,
of all people,
as a meat puppet in a ward somewhere.
Since SSRIs there's been more discussion, but to this day there's so much misapprehension,
typically that
depression equals sadness,
a formula for dramatic disconnect.