ABSTRACT This article explores how local narratives of depression in Seattle are a form of affective mapping that provide a vernacular theory of neoliberal transformation in the city. Seattle depression narratives allegorized a structure of feeling characterizing racially‐inflected capitalist transformations and the recomposition of racial subjectivity, entitlements, and expectations of whiteness under postwar racial capitalism. I address three key depressive plots I discovered during fieldwork, including tales of authentic local character, anxieties regarding a “Suicide Bridge,” and intensified vigilance regarding youthful depression in order to demonstrate how, despite differences, these stories converged in addressing the disturbance of racialized spaces and identities by forms of neoliberal abandonment. I show how depression managed and naturalized downward mobility, disrupted life‐trajectories, new disciplines of workplace intensification and labor insecurity, and a generalized scarcity and withdrawal of middle‐class futurity and the postwar social compact. While depression narratives tracked the affects of neoliberalism, its critical thrust was limited or contained by the tacit ableist assumptions and a melancholic attachment to a possessive investment in postwar whiteness. As such, I suggest that depression is an inadequate concept for our contemporary conjuncture and ongoing mental health crisis, one that naturalizes and obscures both the racial and neoliberal assumptions animating current understandings of mental health and well‐being.
John Marlovits (Thu,) studied this question.