By David Futrelle
Incels insist that no one else can understand their particular brand of loneliness and misery — and that goes double for women. Indeed, they insist, women can’t be “involuntarily celibate” like them because, unlike true incels, women can always find themselves a Chad (or at least some beta cuck) to have sex with.
And because of this, many incels go on to argue, women can’t really suffer from depression either. When women claim to be depressed, they’re just doing it for attention, or as a way to add some drama to their lives.
In a recent post on the Braincels subreddit, a fellow calling himself NoobSoyboy set forth what he sees as the crucial differences between male (real) and female (fake) depression. He started with the ladies:
Female depression teehee: – My boyfriend is not texting back after 5 min – Chad doesn’t want to fuck me – I wasn’t invited at that party – Listening to sad songs – All my friends are busy – Posting on Tumblr – Cutting herself for attention whoring – Eating Ice Cream – Everyone checks out on you and supports you
“Teehee.”
On to the men:
Male depression: – Spend years rotting
– Has never felt intimate human touch – No girlfriend – No friends – Insomnia – Suicidal and homicidal – Alcohol, drugs – PTSD and chased by demons – Nobody gives a fuck and you’re told to fix yourself if you seek help, no support at all
Never mind all those people who have tried over the years to offer incels help, only to have their reasonable suggestions rejected outright.
I wish those roastie would stop making depression look like a fucking joke, females can’t be depressed , stop appropriating male culture you fucking whores.
Yep, in his mind depression belongs to men and men alone. In the past, we’ve seen assorted groups of angry dudes declare all sorts of things — from video gaming to Ghostbuster movies — to be sacred male spaces that women should not be allowed to “invade.” But I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of these angry dudes stake a claim to a mental illness.
Depression, I need hardly remind you, is actually far more likely to strike women than men. According to the Mayo clinic, women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression than men and far more likely to try to commit suicide. (Men succeed at suicide more often because they are far more likely to use more lethal methods.)
One reason that men are so much less likely to be diagnosed with depression is that they’re less willing to seek help for it; they’ve been taught to hide their sadness because showing this sort of “weakness” is seen as unmanly.
But that’s not the whole story. Cis women deal with a host of biological and social factors that cis men don’t face. Cis men don’t suffer from the extreme form of PMS called premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a form of depression; they don’t suffer postpartum depression. (Trans folks of all genders, I should note, are many times more likely to suffer depression than their cis counterparts, mostly because of the bigotry and abuse they face on a regular basis; roughly 40 percent attempt suicide.)
I’ve been dealing with chronic (and sometimes quite severe) depression for decades, and I’ve known numerous others — both male and female — who have also suffered from this debilitating disease. From my own personal experience — as someone who has suffered it and who has watched others suffer from it — I know that depression is every bit as real for women as it is for men.
In the discussion spawned by NoobSoyboy’s absurd post, several women offered similar rebuttals to his, er, theory — describing in detail their own struggles with severe depression and anxiety. But most of the Braincels regulars weren’t much interested; even acknowledging the basic fact that women can suffer depression like men is too much for them, as it undercuts their contention that incels are the most pitiable creatures on the planet.
Commenter after commenter echoed NoobSoybot’s delusional “argument.” As one put it:
Women have no idea how it’s like to be depressed.
Female Depression: “I’m doing bad in school and I didn’t get invited to that party, it’s okay I’m calling my boyfriend and my 3 best friends over to try to comfort me”.
They equate basic sadness to depression. Honestly nothing works out for me so getting bad grades for something I studied for and not getting invited to something is just a normal day.
Their depression is my everyday existence.
Another commenter attacked one of the women who posted about her depression.
I wouldn’t be depressed if I could easily have sex with those of the opposite gender despite being ugly and low value just because of my genitalia. If I woke up a foid tomorrow, I would he able to easily cure my ailments and quickly. Women being depressed is hilarious. You have so much advantages over men and yet you still bitch. …
Fuck me you women seriously cannot put yourselves in our shoes. You won’t ever admit that you have it easy compared to us.
The comment with the most upvotes? A wall of text by someone called tallchad devoted to the proposition that “females just don’t understand what the general feeling of depression is really like,” especially for
males who struggle romantically, like when you try and explain to them what’s the matter for instance they simply cannot fathom what its like to experience such an awful feeling.
Never mind that several women in that very discussion made abundantly clear that they understand depression all too well.
It’s completely alien to them, they haven’t felt anything like it, and why would they? Their lives are literally scripted out for them like something out of the truman show, the female will experience way much more that the average male may never get to experience, just because of the privilege of being born female (you don’t even need to be an attractive female anymore).
Not only is none of this true, but even if it were true it wouldn’t leave women immune to depression. Having your life “scripted out … like something out of the truman show” actually sounds like a nightmare; indeed, the plot of The Truman Show revolved around Truman’s horrific discovery that he’d been imprisoned from birth in a fake, scripted world — and his attempt to escape it.
More to the point, though, depression can strike anyone, regardless of how perfect their life seems. Yes, depression affects poor people more than rich — because they tend to have more stresses and fewer resources — but hot young heiresses can be as miserable as any incel, because depression is a disease. Chads and Staceys can get cancer, too.
The female experiences everything, from … males way out of their league all the way to having a nice house and having a betabux provider that buys them the new shoes she wants whilst she stays at home or works a comfortable office job.
Incels live in a fantasy land. It’s not possible for most mothers to stay at home to raise the kids any more; they’re far more likely to run themselves ragged working and doing the bulk of the childcare (if they’re not raising the kids on their own). Many of these women work on their feet all day; women make up the vast majority of nurses and health aides.
Meanwhile your average male has failed at every hurdle, all the support is on women because of the gyrocentric nature of society, and frankly, he feels like he’s been left behind, then for the next 50-60 years he’s working a low wage job being barked orders by sociopaths … .
This just in: all men have shitty jobs; no women ever have shitty jobs.
What does the most damage is that [men] can’t find a life long partner, this is what hypergamy has done, the average male’s looksmatch equivalent has had so much positive reinforcement growing up that she thinks nothing can stop her from marrying someone way above her looks level, she ends up in a perpetual cycle, getting pumped and dumped by chad because he doesn’t want to commit (and why would he lol) then onto the next one, then onto the next, etc. etc. until she hits the wall and has to settle for a betabux provider.
None of this is true. According to one recent survey, the median number of lifetime opposite-sex sex partners for straight men between the ages of 25-44 was 6.1; for their female counterparts it was 4.2. (I’m guessing the difference between those two numbers has to do with the tendency of men to exaggerate and women to downplay their sexual activity, and also due to the small percentage of the female population that engages in sex work.) The “cock carousel” is a myth.
So the average male is left with limited options, he can either rope or keep coping and trying until he’s cold, dead, rotting away and underneath the ground, but to do this he must continue working 60 hour weeks, and these weeks continue to grind him down… effectively like a huge axe cutting away his mental state, he gets left utterly devastated by years of emotional neglect, his goodness being sucked out of him, he sees no goodness in the world anymore. It just keeps getting worse and worse, until the rope finally looks more appealing.
This is what the world looks like to someone who is seriously depressed. It’s not reality. Depression distorts your thinking; incel ideology compounds this distortion, making depression worse. Incel ideology functions much like a disease, harming everyone who takes it seriously. If you’re a young man dealing with depression, incel sites are the absolute worst places in the world to seek help.
I’ve read through all thirteen days of NoobSoyboy’s comments and submissions on Reddit.
I can only conclude that he is a deeply unhappy and negative person who thinks extremely lowly of non-White women (especially “Muslim” and Chinese women), and who thinks that anyone who chooses to seek out and engage in activities that make them happy, is somehow lesser for it.
Either that, or he’s an extremely dedicated, though unsuccessful, troll trying to get a rise out of posters on r/IncelTears, r/exmuslim and r/UnpopularOpinion (Warning: Unabashed assholes are present in that last one)
He claims to be 24, going on 25, and going to “White school in Canada”, FWIW.
(Aside regarding his username: I must applaud his bravery in telling the world that he is not only an unskilled novice, but also knowingly consumes soy products that his ideology tells him would feminize him. /s)
I feel like I’ve seen this kind of nonsense out of these guys before. I can’t remember exactly when, though.
I don’t actually think the current prevailing theory of depression is any more accurate than the current prevailing theory of addiction, or anxiety. Maybe for a few people, but for the majority? No. The cause for all three is more closely tied to how our society is terrible at helping people get their needs met, particularly needs for interaction with other people and with nature, but also more basic needs, like not living under constant stress.
There’s a slowly growing body of research supporting this understanding of the causes of addiction, depression & anxiety. Which is interesting when you see how little evidence there is for the current paradigm, even in the drug trials for antidepressants & anti-anxiety drugs. https://www.facebook.com/NowThisOpinions/videos/2022718747818239/?hc_ref=ARRaOt8hcyOpBYNErB6ugaMKj6Gseu9t7H9rJ9IAUXswNYj6Nf7_qbulyn3wHw9IMmw (hope that works)
Anyway, none of that even remotely agrees with their nonsense that “women don’t have depression”, if anything it would align with the statistics that women experience depression more often.
Also, yes I was totally just sad that some boy hadn’t called me when I first tried to kill myself at 12, and it had nothing to do with being one of the massively high numbers of adoptees with depression, resulting in 4x greater numbers of adoptee suicides than the general population.
@Skylalalalalalala
Here is a counterpoint from The Guardian about the claims made by Johann Hari, the man in the video, regarding depression.
I’m on three psych meds for depression.
I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum.
And sure, my mental illness is all in my head.
Of course it is! It’s where I keep my brain!
As opposed to incels, etc. who keep their brain in their pants.
I’m not an expert in discourse analysis, but I noticed that in this paragraph where the guy’s mocking the idea of women getting depressed, he can’t even stay in the 1st person (quoted, my highlight):
Yet another thing that suggests women having a self is unimaginable to them.
I’d like to add that along with post partum depression, prenatal depression is a thing. Not enough people know about it, and a mere 40 years ago, it was considered to be impossible for pregnancy to cause depression. It’s less commonly screened for than ppd, and a ton of women don’t seek help for it because “hormones cause mood swings! Pregnancy is weird!”
It’s hard for those of us who had it to talk about it, because the social narrative is that babies are always happy, exciting, delightful. Gestating is hard even under the best circumstances; it is brutal when the only emotion you can feel towards the baby is resentment.
So if getting screwed is the magical preventative for depression in feeeeeeeemales, I suppose that when I started struggling with depression I was supposed to, what, go find some gross dude to stick his dick in me, and it would’ve cleared right up?
To clarify, my best guess for onset of major depression is around 10 years old.
Though really, considering the source, I don’t actually want to hear their opinions on that, TBH.
@Eloo
When my friend was pregnant she had a huge spike in anxiety. I know, some anxiety is normal when you are about to take on the responsibility of having a child, but I think hers went above normal. In any case, it was definitely very real.
@NoobSoyboy:
Ah, I think I can diagnose the causes of some of that. Let’s see, here…Ah, yes:
Toxic masculinity. Any intimate human touch for a man must be from a girlfriend, or else GAAAAAAAAY! Thus, straight men, and only straight men, are dependent on a female romantic partner to get any sort of touching … even nonsexual touching. And going without that is stressful for a primate.
Toxic masculinity again, mixed with conservatism in general. Giving a fuck, after all, is for wusses; real men are jaded cynics out for number one whereas anyone else is naïve at best, most likely a cuck, and maybe even gay or feeeeeeemale.
Toxic masculinity, in its “a real man is 100% self-reliant” mode.
Toxic masculinity yet again.
I think we’ve found the cause of your problem! Unfortunately I’ve no idea how to cure it. You’ve been poisoned by a society that itself has been steeped in poison by a narrow subset of would-be oligarchs who profit handsomely from doing so. Call it one more form of pollution from the guys who love to socialize the risk and privatize the profit.
Your best hope for recovery would be a change of environment and an open mind … oh, wait.
Welcome to neoliberal America. I hope you’ve been voting for progressive-wing Democrats all these years you’ve been complaining about the shitty working conditions you’ve experience. You see we once had a standard 40 hour workweek from about ages 18 to 65, which is less than fifty years, thanks to a Democrat named Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “New Deal”. But then the economic right wingers (not all of whom were even Republicans) began to chip and erode and whittle away at the New Deal, until now it’s all but gone and the bad old days of pre-Depression-era extreme labor exploitation are with us again.
Wait, what? You voted for Trump?! You eeeeeeediot!
Toxic masculinity and neoliberalism are two of the pillars supporting your problems … but the third is that you are your own worst enemy, doubling down on every single thing that put you in this situation in the first place. MOAR toxic masculinity! MOAR voting for rich white dudes who will govern for the benefit or other rich white dudes! …
@VolCel:
Take comfort in that thought, the incel would say to a homeless woman whom statistics show is at an especially high risk of being raped.
Hate is not an effective self-medication.
@ Knitting Cat Lady
You are right about Incels keeping their brains in their pants…at the back I’d say….
Christ the point flies right over their heads doesn’t it?
The getting ground down by a horrid job, not having any friends to talk to about being depressed because you are male and can’t show weakness, the lonely nature of being a cis-het american male…
That’s all patriarchy dummies!
It’s toxic masculinity that says you can’t cry, that you can’t hug your male friends, that you can’t have an intimate connection with anyone other than the woman you’re in a relationship with.
That’s the patriarchy.
Everything they’re so upset about is done by the systems they desperately seek to uphold.
It’s the gazillionth repetition of, “My feelings are real and important, yours aren’t.” It’s the opposite of “Do as you would be done by.”
I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, something like 43% of trans people attempt suicide before they come out and transition. Post transition it’s around 4% (not sure if that’s attempts or “successful” suicides). There’s no knowing how many trans people kill themselves without ever telling anyone else that they’re trans.
The 4% post-transition suicide rate is way higher than the general population, and I’ve seen that used as an argument against any treatment for gender dysphoria at all. But as you say, bigotry and abuse. Plus the 90% reduction seems to me like a huge argument in favour of transition for anyone who wants it. Clearly living a lie hurts like hell, far worse than the shit people throw at them.
Nthing the thing about prepartum depression. Well, it wasn’t full depression. Luckily I’ve learned my warning signs and I’ve learned what helps for me and I was able to stop it spiralling out of control. But somehow being pregnant made me rehash everything unwonderful about my own childhood (which led to some useful insights, so there’s that).
The thing that strikes me is that we have no need to consider depression, just think about ordinary mood changes caused by external events. A rotten day at work, your sibling-parent-friend-child is in hospital, this month’s pay won’t cover all your rent, power, fares, grocery expenses, a close friend or relative is leaving forever, your gran-cousin-favourite-aunt is having ominous tests for cancer/ghastly chronic condition.
Irritable, worried, sad, anxious, disappointed, grieving, regretful … how sure would we be that these guys would recognise these not-depressed-but-pretty-awful concerns and feelings in anyone, not just women? The mere fact that they seem to be under the impression that everyone everywhere all-the-time thinks about sex or its lack in the obsessive way that they do simply reeks of lack of experience in human interaction. (They weren’t raised by wolves so they must recognise family interaction even if they’re no good at it.)
It also reeks of both projection and depression. But I’m not here to write an essay. An emotional range of a to b and no further – along with persistent refusal to see anyone else’s distress, or even positive feelings, in terms other than their own warped ideas about sex – is not a happy or sensible place to be. If I’m weeping it’s more likely that my relative, friend or pet has just become ill or died than that I’m overwhelmed by lack-of-sex.
I find this whole business of “women can’t be depressed because sex” fascinating and disturbing, partly because many of the women I know (as well as several men, especially gay men) actively use sex as self-harm in response to depression. I’m not at all trying to suggest that promiscuity is pathological or anything (it isn’t, and obviously lots of people are promiscuous just because it’s fun, or because they find it emotionally helpful, etc. – no condemnation of that here!), but it’s very clear to me that for some people, sex not only fails to cure depression, it’s actively part of the disease state.
Also, as someone who has personally had their depression exacerbated by sex (not just by rape/sexual assault, but by consensual sex which has fed several of my neuroses around gender, physicality, touch, and self-doubt), that’s fascinating too.
For the most part, though… I live a pretty charmed life by the standards of our society. I’m well-off, educated, full-time employed, in a stable relationship, with a family I love, etc., etc. – and yet since the age of 14 I’ve been self-harming and attempted suicide three times. Some of it is just illness and brain chemistry. Some of it is the fact that I’m physically and mentally disabled and, at 25, less fit than many people three times my age. Some of it is frustration at assigned gender roles. Some of it is political anxiety, social anxiety, PTSD, stress, gender dysphoria, associated other mental disorders… Almost none of it is anything to do with sex or relationships, either any lack of it now or the bad sexual experiences I’ve had in the past. Go figure. It’s almost like my vagina isn’t the centre of my being or something.
Conversely, how would these assholes respond to someone like M, a trans guy I know, whose depression symptoms (and anxiety) have almost vanished since he “became” a guy? Living as a woman, which in these guys’ minds is completely perfect and easy, he struggled not only with gender dysphoria but with sexual harassment, with social exclusion, being undermined in his academic field, etc. He transitioned a year or so ago, and lo and behold, he’s laid off the self-harm and suffers less from executive dysfunction, has gained confidence, socialises more freely, and generally is a happier, healthier person. And here’s the thing: he’s aromantic and asexual. He hasn’t been in a relationship in years, or wanted to be. Again, shockingly, turns out that some people are depressed for reasons completely unrelated to whether they’re getting laid.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but honestly all of this rambling is just a precursor to one thing, which is that before any of this went through my head, I spent a good five minutes laughing at the idea of “gyrocentrism”.
News flash… “getting your end wet” is NOT the cure for all ailments… sexual intimacy does not cure depression… in my experience, sexual intimacy without emotional intimacy is, itself, very depressing
@wwth:
right up there with the “theory” that the earth is flat and Antarctica is an ice wall surrounding the disc….
@Z&T – sorry about your mom. Hope you’re doing okay, or as okay as you can be at the moment.
The OP had me thinking of something that I caught on Sam Seder’s show this morning, in a clip where an African-American caller (who called in previously with his fears that his undocumented wife would be deported) to discuss that recent New York Times article tut-tutting liberals for being too mean to the white racists. After sharing his story of a confrontation with a drunk Trump-supporting neighbour in Yuma, Arizona, Michael Brooks shared a story when he was renting an apartment in his last year of college where the white landlady would come to him, knowing he was a progressive, and test the latest conspiracy theory out on him. But what struck me was what Michael said that she said to him after he told her “I don’t really want to talk about this.”
She said “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t be saying this stuff. But black people can be racist too.”
The thesis is this: these people can’t admit to themselves that there may be something fundamentally wrong with them–and them alone–that needs fixing. An empathy subroutine or algorithm that has just been corrupted in their brains. So they come up with excuses to protect their concepts of themselves as good, worthy people.
My interactions with my co-worker Dan have yielded similar phrases. Black folks can be racist too! Feminists can be so sexist! You’re just virtue signalling! The subtext of it all being “We’re all equally terrible people, right? I mean, there’s no way you can really be that decent a person. You’re just as jaded and cynical and beholden to the neoliberal world where we have to step on each others’ fingers to get ahead as I am, right? Right?”
And this goes beyond empathy, as the OP reflects. There’s a reason these people are so resistant to the idea of “privilege” because if they have all this privilege and still fail at life on easy mode, what does that say about their concepts of racial supremacy when they see a black person succeed on hard mode? What does that say about them in this myth of meritocracy? They can’t fathom that maybe in the Darwinian world they’ve championed, maybe they don’t come out on top. Black folks have been subjected to some of the worst torture humans can endure in the days of slavery… and come out the other side to succeed. Women have been treated to some of the most despicable brutalizations on their bodies for all human history… and now they’re standing tall astride men who have never had that kind of challenge.
So women have to be faking this depression. No way the “inferior sex” can weather all this and come out the other side with an intact sense of themselves, with healthy interactions with others. I mean, I’ve internalized my anxieties about virginity and blamed women for them while indulging my worst instincts on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan… you mean these feeble women-folk have put up with all of our threats of bodily harm, the popular culture that devalues them and misogyny of the men in their lives and persevered?
No way they can be that strong. Clearly, they’re faking this “depression” they claim to have. I’m the one with real problems.
Like Michael Brooks said at the end of that clip… people don’t change having their comfort indulged. I’m tired of indulging other people’s comfort. Let’s make these jerks as uncomfortable as possible.
One idea I’d really like people to get rid of is the idea that depression is completely caused by your external circumstances. (Like whether or not other people are willing to have sex with you.)
I’ve suffered from depression for my whole life, and I’ve also had to deal with so many people telling me that my life is great, and that so many other people have it harder than me, so I shouldn’t be depressed. That only made me feel guilty for being depressed, which made me even more depressed.
Only after lots of therapy, reading, and medications did I finally figure out that depression has at least as much to do with how you view the world than what’s actually happening to you. The reason I’m depressed is that I always view things in the most negative light possible. Other people have bad things happen to them too, but they are better able to cope with it, so they don’t become depressed like I do.
And I know that’s true because years ago I was on an antidepressant that actually worked. Nothing else in my life changed except for taking that pill everyday, but negative things that happened to me just didn’t bother me as much. I felt more like, “ok, this is no big deal, I can handle this,” instead of feeling completely overwhelmed and hopeless. It was a little taste of what it’s like to be a person who doesn’t have depression.
I’m not on any medications anymore (except for synthroid, which also really helps, showing that some of my depression was caused by hypothyroidism), but just knowing that something as simple as taking a pill managed to change my whole outlook on life was really useful, because now when I have a depressive episode, I can more easily tell myself that it’s just the depression talking and not listen to what it’s telling me.
So I guess I am kind of saying that “depression is all in your head,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not real or you can just snap out of it, any more than you can just snap out of diabetes because it’s all in your pancreas.
I’m sorry if they have depression. Depression sucks: it can kill, it can severely limit life and life chances, and having it myself I wish it on nobody.
What I don’t get it repurposing it, or worse adopting it, as anger, scapegoating, justification for violence and violent fantasies, trying to claim it as “culture” (a culture based on one gender alone?) – and the lack of empathy, the desire for and delight in other people’s pain.
I can be grumpy and self-obsessed when things are bad (not when it’s very bad, when I’m basically nothing at all but trying to hold it together enough to keep on breathing).
But few people I know with actual depression become vile human beings, or encourage others to become viler than they already are.
For more than a quarter of a century, I honestly don’t think I’ve gone more than three weeks without a consensual sexual encounter with an enthusiastic partner, and the gaps are usually a lot less – so according to these bozos my life over this period should have been essentially perfect.
Which is news to me.
As others have commented, there are actually few things that will make you routinely depressed and self-loathing than unsatisfactory sexual encounters with people that you basically don’t like very much except as the convenient possessor of compatible genitalia (or equivalents thereof). And even if you’re in a full-time relationship with a genuine life partner, it’s not always going to be permanent sunshine, even if you’re both firmly committed to the long haul.
In fact, this reminds me that after our first child was born, my wife suffered what she now recognises as quite severe postnatal depression – it was obvious to me that something was badly wrong, but given all the other pressures on us at that time it wasn’t anything that we felt needed diagnosis or treatment. If any of these incels wants to tell her to her face that it wasn’t “real” depression, they’re most welcome, but… well, they need to be serious about having written off their chances of reproducing.
@Katamount
I partially agree with you in that there’s a subtext is “we’re all equally terrible people”, but I’m not sure I can get on board with the whole “empathy algorithm being corrupted” given that these people are capable of tremendous amounts of empathy when their own are concerned.
The current Right has made every abuse tactic a core part of their strategy:
– Manipulation
– Abusive language
– Coded insults
– Attempts at isolating both their victims and their defenders (by mocking the people who rightfully call them out on their coded insults, and suggesting they’re paranoid)
– Actual physical abuse, most often under the protection of law enforcement or even masqueraded as such
– Gaslighting
This isn’t an incapability for empathy, but rather an obvious desire to dominate, to subjugate, to control. They often exhibit psychopathic traits, such as celebrating the suffering of those they consider lesser than them.
As a whole, these collectives are nothing short of organized abusers, constantly trying to up their game and tactics in order to maintain control of their victims. These self-pitying rants are mostly performative attempts at manipulation. In reality, they do not believe one goddamn word they spew out of their mouths, they just want to be perceived as victims so they can get on with their abusive behavior.
Mr. Incel there can fuck right off.
In my lifetime (as a cis woman) I have experienced bouts of depression and anxiety over quite a lot of things. Exactly zero of them have anything to do with me not getting enough attention/sex from “Chads” (or “Stacys,” since I am bisexual.)
You Incel assholes do not OWN depression, and having sex won’t cure depression. That’s just ridiculously false.
Not exactly on topic, but as fat shaming can be a stressor and add to depression, this story has been in the news lately up here:
Woman uses obituary to advocate against fat shaming in medical profession
In summary, a woman who recently died at 64 of an inoperable cancer had been feeling unwell for years, but never really got diagnosed until far too late because doctors kept focusing on her weight as the supposed cause of her problems. She then used her obituary to launch an attack on the issues in the health care system that led to that.