Clinically, no.

Do I have occasional feelings of sadness, anxiety, ennui, helplessness, despair, lack of motivation, etc, and do bad things happen in my life?

Yes, absolutely, that’s a part of being human.

Am I happy?

Well that’s a more complicated question than it may seem.

Am I totally satisfied with every aspect of my life and the world around me as it is now and where it seems to be going?

No, not by a longshot.

Is my situation “good enough” for now, does it seem like things will improve for me, do my good days outnumber the bad, am I overall enjoying life and looking forward to hopefully many more years of it, am I able to spend time with people I love, in places I want to be, doing things I like and want to do?

Overall, yes. Not that there isn’t plenty of room for things to improve for me and lots of things that I would change if I could but I can’t, but I’m getting enough of the things I want out of life that I can say that overall I’m happy.

There is depression and then there is clinically diagnosed depression. The two are not the same. Self diagnosis can only go so far and has a high likelihood of being wrong. The latter is not as common to have.

I’m the proud owner of “treatment resistant depression”, so yes. I’ve been sad my whole life but I started having suicidal ideation in my late 20’s.

I have a therapist and a psychiatrist so I am medicated and working on it.

Depressions sucks, but the SSRIs that I am on have wiped out my anxiety. It’s like I am a completely new person. I can go grocery shopping without nearly panicking. Somehow I found an (ex) wife before I was medicated but dating is now not quite as painful.

But yeah, I still have varying levels of bad days and I don’t know what happy actually means for me.

In my case, I’m just addicted to social media like Lemmy. That’s what causes it. I can’t quit it.

No

Am I? Probably.

Is everyone I know? No idea, can’t say it’s something that comes up and I’m not qualified to diagnose them.

I’m not depressed. Sometimes I get a little seasonal affective disorder but I just take vitamin D now and that seems to have solved that.

Not depressed nor are most people around me.

Sorry. I hope you find someone to talk to or some other way to cope.

I’m not depressed (I think). But everyone I know well enough that I’m certain I could tell if they had symptoms of depression has at least some of these.

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When I was six and in first grade, the teachers directed me to the school psychologist. But it was the early 1970s and people had just seen The Exorcist and believed it was based on a true story, so when it came to me, I was just a bit odd.

It would turn into a diagnosis Major Depression in my early twenties, severe enough to get disability benefits. It would become Anaclitic Depression in my late twenties. Around fifty, I was the subject of my psychotherapist’s PHD thesis and got an ASD diagnosis out of it. I’m now enby, though through most of my life I was [M] because that’s what it said on my state ID. Whatever.

When I was in a partial hospital program, the fine doctors who answered questions explained some models regarding sanity, that almost everyone has to contend at very least with neuroses, which are characterized by internal conflicts. Those are like:

• Wanting to be a kind person vs. wanting to adequately compete in the corporate sector to gain some upward mobility.
• Wanting to be civil (and within the constraints of legality) vs. wanting to fully express outrage for local or national injustice
• Wanting my daughter to grow up with a healthy sexuality vs. Not wanting her to express her adulthood just yet.

This was in the nineties, in which the US was undergoing an epidemic of mental illness, featuring a lot of major depression. There are reservations in the academic sector as to opine why – I expect – for the same reason climatologists who are willing to discuss the expected outcome of the current climate path are rare: It leads to come uncomfortable truths that our society is not ready to address. In the case of everybody crazy, the hypothesis is that it’s intergenerational. We’re not meant to exist in a society where every adult is required to work forty-plus hours a week (plus breaks, plus commute). We’re also meant to have parents who are not exhausted all the time. The madness is intergenerational, with cumulative family dysfunction getting passed down, as people not only neglect their kids, but self medicate to cope, so they’re even less available.

So, no, the possibility that everyone is crazy is not crazy at all. It’s a product of the industrial age. What’s worse is the psychiatric community is expected to treat it as a medical issue. Toxic work life and toxic home life making you depressed? Here, take some pills. If you can afford to sob at a therapist one hour a week, do so. In any other situation we’d remove the patients from the hazardous area but that would cause the economy to collapse, because that’s the entire workforce.

There are some capitalists who are aware they get better productivity out of their workforce by acknowleding they are human beings, not machines, but those are the rare exceptions. The rest of them believe J. D. Vance has a point. So we’re not going to move towards any rational solutions for a while.

I don’t have any solutions to this.

For my own case, I’ve reframed my own life as a renegade in a society that has, itself, gone entirely rogue. We are the punk in the cyberpunk dystopia we live in. This is your YAF coming of age story where the ministries try to mold you into a solder or laborer for some billionaire’s vanity project, to be used and discarded like a disposable part. Find a way to escape and run!

Or if you’re my age, find the places where Big Brother is blind to your thoughts and actions, and subvert the system from within.

Not at the moment, though maybe my therapist would say I’m experiencing low-key depression. I’m clinically diagnosed bipolar, so I’ve seen incredibly much worse, as in paralyzing me with dread. But I found a partner who keeps me engaged and active and we started living together early this year and that has done a lot to keep me out of my head. 2020 was fucking doom because I lived alone and had no car and spent way too much time just cooking on all the things that could go wrong while isolating.

I expect a lot a terrible shit to happen where I am (USA) in the next four months. But I’m not thinking about it much. I haven’t directly asked any friends, but I think I know one who would probably say yes to depression. But he’s working at a soul-crushing job that I also once worked and for that reason I don’t think he counts toward your survey.

Therapy and treatment really helps. Good luck.

I am not depressed, and I don’t think I have ever been (outside of maybe a few days or weeks of sadness when tragic things occurred, but I don’t think that would be classified as depression).

Am I happy? I think so. Maybe it’s more of a contentedness?

I don’t really think of most of the people around me as depressed either. But maybe it’s just that they hide it, or maybe it’s just that I don’t see it due to my own outlook.

Both clinically and in reference to current events/future issues.

It has been at least 20 years that I’ve dealt with depression and simply not wanting to exist anymore. It’s probably only around 6-8 that I’ve also lost hope, developed frequent panic attacks, and have become depressed about my own future. I separate that from what I’d consider to be the “clinical” depression that is just my broken brain. The future of everyone globally is a whole nother layer of depression…

As for those around me, everyone seems “happy” as far as they can be with their lot in life. Not depressed, some are just bummed about specific things.

I’m confused, are you talking about literal depression or just feeling generally sad/down?

I’m diagnosed with depression, have been since I was a teenager, but I don’t know many others that are.