Yes, the scale of this is truly horrifying. I think you are justified in using the term ‘holocaust’. I too have been struck by the parallel and led to wonder whether we - meaning the nations of the so-called developed world - ever truly faced and processed the hard facts about humankind’s capacity for cruelty that were laid bare in those camps in Auschwitz, Dachau etc., or if we merely pushed that horror underground, only for it to reemerge in a case of what psychologists call the ‘return of the repressed’.
I believe we who live in these nations have been led to believe a fantasy story about what our lives can be. Staring out at us from billboards, magazines, television sets and more recently computer and smart phone screens are images of people airbrushed to a supernatural apex of physical perfection, acting out lives of staged and scripted bliss.
When our own lives inevitably fall short of this, in step the big corporations to sell us a miracle. There are miracle foods, miracle creams, miracle exercise regimes, miracle gadgets and of course, as those of us who now gather here were unlucky enough to find out, miracle pills.
It’s surely more than just a tragic irony that the three drugs that have become the primary focus of this messageboard, Propecia, Accutane and SSRIs, all target conditions that wouldn’t even have been thought of as conditions a hundred years ago. Going bald, getting spots, feeling sad, these used to be considered part and parcel of life. This is not to say they were necessarily seen as easy, but that life itself was not seen as something that had to be easy all of the time, whereas nowadays, that is what people expect, demand, and are sold.
It’s as if the horrors we encountered in history were too much to bear and we went running from reality into a dream, this dream of high-gloss perfection, forgetting that dreams have a tendency to turn into nightmares.
These nightmares break through not just into our own lives, but also into the lives of those other ones, the people who live in what is sometimes called the Global South, those impoverished and war-torn parts of the world whose labour and resources we relentlessly exploit in a desperate effort to sustain our crumbling dream.
Where am I going with this? God knows. I like to think in terms of the big picture; psychiatrists have been wont to tell me it’s an overabundance of dopamine in the brain. I don’t pay them much attention, but it may be true that I can get a bit carried away by these thought-trains sometimes. Still, I couldn’t help but be struck by the way you laid out the multiple levels of failure and inaction that stand in the way of this modern-day holocaust coming to light and I felt I had to try and make some sense of it.
As for the question of hope in your own life, I hear you. The picture can sometimes look very bleak indeed. However, we can never know what the future may hold. I know it’s a bumper-sticker philosophy, but sometimes they’re the best ones. Even if all the usual avenues down which people achieve success in their lives are closed to you, perhaps, as others have suggested above, you’ll surprise yourself and find a secret path all of your own.
Remarkable things happen in this life. This is what keeps me going. I could never have foreseen the way my life has gone up to this point, it’s taken so many extraordinary twists and turns; mostly for the worse, yes, but I remain hopeful.