Yeah I see that, but also maybe it means that the fact you have to be medicated to deal with the system highlights some inherent deficiencies in the system itself?

So, I struggled massively with ADHD symptoms in my teens and 20s. Despite failing out of school, and struggling in all the classic ways, I was never diagnosed.

My folks "didn't want the kids on pills" and so despite needing help I was just called lazy and never received any help.

The best way to mitigate the symptoms is with stimulants. I self prescribed caffeine. If I was in a different environment that could have easily been something illegal.

I was never diagnosed and I wish I was, because if I could have focused on classwork in high school, I could have went to college, and I could have started doing work that interests me at the beginning of my 20s instead of the end of my 20s.

You need to examine your shallow attitude about medication. It's "I don't like it because other stuff is better", and a bunch of anxiety around what if what if what if.

What if you deny your child the one tool that actually allows them to reach their potential? You try these "better" options and waste their youth instead of using methods that are proven to be reliable?

The meme doesn't stigmatize mental illness because it's not talking about mental illness.

If anything, pathologizing the predictable and inescapable results of living under oppressive systems designed to keep you as down and alienated as possible as a mental illness, instead of a perfectly valid reaction to living in dystopia deeply and negatively impacts how we treat actual mental illness.

The idea that pointing out that we have societal problems pills can't solve is somehow stigmatising actual mental illness (which pills can help) just goes to show how deeply indoctrinated society is in to toxic individualism.

I concur

This was also my takeaway. The comic isn't making a value determination for medication in any form, but instead commenting that we as a society would rather address symptoms rather than address any root causes.

I worked at a Psych hospital for a while, it's pretty well accepted that most people could benefit from something sometimes, even if it's just a Valium or a pot brownie.

Hurray! Their humon is weak to thc due to genetics and is now permanently confused!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8286638/

This is interesting to bring up because I'm coming from about as opposite a point of view as I can. Capitalism contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction which is as clear today as it was in the nineteenth century. It inevitably trends toward the centralization of power and the most any government has ever been able to do about that is slow it down or reverse it temporarily. For the last few decades the global nature of capital has made it a supernational force which is above regulation, even determining who is allowed into government at all throughout much of the world. Either Capitalism will end when the winners close the door behind them and some kind of neo-feudalism on a world scale will happen or the infrastructure supporting Capitalism will collapse prior to that point. Capitalist Realism is absurd unless one has been conditioned to assume it as self-evidently the best possible system which can exist and actively dismiss any criticism of any kind of economy at all.

I have not read the referenced book, so I'll address the general idea I got from the wikipedia summary. It is absolutely true that there have been models for settled society which were vastly superior in terms of average quality of life than anything based on European Feudalism, including Capitalism. There are clear examples from history and existing today (The Zapatista movement is a favorite of mine). The issue is that these cultures don't exist in a vacuum and can only exist for as long as they don't have to contend with an amount of violence which threatens to supersede their sovereignty, and collecting the volence to wield themselves undermines the pro-social nature of their own society. The power of global capital has been wielded with impunity for the last few centuries directly undermining many of the pro-social societies. Many of these societies collapsed not because they failed their people but because they failed to defend them. If they had changed fundamentally to repel violence, they would have lost their society in doing so anyway. In 2024 technology and the centralization of wealth to a few places on the planet has made it possible for a few people to run a global empire, and everyone on earth must deal with this reality in some way. Either they conform to it or resist it, but they must deal with it. I don't like the nature of the system that we live in but as long as it is possible to inflict the will of power using violence and there are people around who are willing to believe that people wielding power like this are legitimate, we will continue to have this problem.

I'm not even arguing that this scale of violence is natural. Like agriculture itself, it developed gradually by complete accident. For most of human history the level of violence one needed to prepare for was vastly different in different parts of the world, allowing for many of these societies to flourish without worry. In 2024 everyone is vulnerable to capital. After capitalism, we could have a socialist system we developed intentionally which hopefully covers all the important variables this time but most likely our intentions will meet with millions to billions of people testing the new system in all kinds of ways the designers could never have predicted. We could also simply have warlordism, as there would still be plenty game theory types feeling obligated to take everything they can get before they get overrun by not growing fast enough from the myriad others thinking exactly the same thing. My preferred end to history is a series of autonomous communities run democratically with no violence whatsoever, but we have a lot of development to do as a species before we can settle into that.

Having experienced the pills and the nothing, yes, the medicine is so much better. It's not even close. They're not magic happiness pills, and they don't make you feel good. They just make it a bit easier to manage the worst times. And that makes a huge difference.