Depression Is a Disease of Civilization — Aboriginal Australians Hold The Cure

For a while I used to live with Aboriginal Australians. I was involved with a project that had to do with the improvement of Aboriginal livelihood in the Northern Territory of Australia. The area is very remote and quite dangerous, but it taught me many things — especially about depression.


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Based on three different livelihood indexes, two Australian and one from the UN, aboriginal people are the happiest people on earth even if their average lifespan is just about 43 years.

Government funded incentives to 'assist further' remote communities in NT never worked. All that Aboriginal people ever wanted from the government was their old plundered trees. They find us weird because we have to live and sleep in cage houses while they only need a tree.

They do not view the world like we do. They do not have the monotheistic fear of death that has been ingrained in everything in our society. They do not even experience the world based on past, present and future. Their perception is completely different, as if time does not exist — everyone and everything is connected through circles or relative connection.  They do not even abide to psychology (or what I call, social engineering) in order to see if they are 'normal' in respect to their peers.


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It's a hell of a trip to walk in their shoes day by day. I did it for some months and it was one of the best experiences I ever had. It makes you realise a lot about life, especially things we all take for granted.

Living with them, I soon realised that we, as westerners, are extremely conditioned from our culture. It is almost as if we have spawned from a cult. We follow crazy rituals on a daily basis basis just to get by and not resort to insanity. It blows my mind how many times we change masks in order to be able to function in so many different situations. We never realise it because everyone is doing the same exact thing.

Our societies need a tremendous amount of rules to operate. They are unwritten ones most of the time, but they take a toll in each and every thing we do. From the people we love, to the people we work with, the way we perceive wealth, death. Aboriginal Australians are way passed that. They follow the rules of their own self as it reflected through nature. They are individuals unbounded by the judgment of their peers. They are truly free.

Western Civilisation is making itself sick with depression. Don't get me wrong. Aboriginals get depressed. They also do get panic attacks and everything else we experience. The difference is that they consider them part of life and something that the individual has to go through, as a rite of passage, in order to be a proper human being. We forgot how to do this. Aboriginals almost never report depression. It also explains why their happiness index is through the roof; their medicine is 100mg of Man The Fuck Up instead of $200 /per hour to your local ‘therapist’.


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As westerners we have become extremely brainwashed and softies with normality. We are constantly evaluating each other based on what other people do —ending being constantly unease with ourselves. There is massive pandemic with western psychosis.

We have replaced religion with psychology as if it is going to solve our problems. We invented psychology as a modern escape from Religion, a coping mechanism. We get accepted into a therapy group, a 'church', a 'community' where we are all 'equal'. The groupies are there to 'treat' us everytime we deviate from the norm. Our best friend we pay by the hour—talk about prostitution...

We ended up fearing life. We get 'depressed' because our lover left us; or because we didn’t get a raise at work; or because we lost friends on facebook. First World Problems, that are really no problems at all. White whine because, hey, there is nothing really important to complain about.


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We forgot how to get a real hit and stand up. We are 'offended' and 'hurt' and need 'therapy'. We teach our kids to be vulnerable because we only promote positivism and wishful thinking. We have been completely cut off from reality and so our bodies rebel against us— in the form of depression as if they want to reset. We have fallen down and we are still waiting for someone else to pick us up. The only problem is that almost all of us are lying down on the floor and no amount of pills can pick us back up.

We are not depressed. We are just fooling ourselves so much, even our brains have given up on us.