Robin’s ‘weak’

Robin’s ‘weak’ | Daily Tribune

Naif Senator Robinhood Padilla ignominiously spoke too soon about depression last week.

Mere days after calling out today’s youth for being “weak” and casually dismissing depression, Padilla confessed in a radio interview, “I cried, I felt depressed,” on learning that the International Criminal Court had named Senators Bong Go and Bato dela Rosa as co-perpetrators in the war on drugs.

In confessing, Padilla probably intended to charm with his paean to political chumminess. But he had no such luck. He ended up heckled.

Not least because he was blind to dramatic irony, the irony that comes when the audience he was speaking to knew something he did not.

To make matters worse, a stupefied audience couldn’t help but see his confession as the exact opposite of his opinion about depression at a Senate hearing.

In that hearing, meant to address children’s safety in unsafe social media spaces, Padilla boldly uttered assertions like, “Noong panahon naming hindi uso yung usapin ‘depression,’ hindi ko nga alam ‘yun e (In our time, ‘depression’ wasn’t trendy. I didn’t even know of it).”

Aghast reactions quickly ensued. One mental health advocate scored Padilla for choosing “to frame the conversation through nostalgia and anecdote rather than science, evidence, and lived reality.”

In another reaction, a prominent father, whose daughter’s battle with depression took a fatal turn, lamented that “it’s not that simple, senator. It’s not that simple.”

In short, for many, Padilla spoke out of line.

Ironically, as events changed and his political fortunes declined a few days later, he used the very same word he had upbraided today’s youth with to describe his emotions.

Which only meant Padilla revealed his lack of knowledge of words to describe his emotions, one word he earlier believed didn’t exist when he was growing up.

Now, it might be true that Padilla’s claim reflects that of his generation, Generation X. Some claim Gen X lacks the vocabulary or openness to discuss mental health issues.

Born in 1969, Padilla is definitely a Gen X cohort, which some observers note is the generation that, in contrast to today’s Millennials, are the “digital immigrants” who can’t make heads or tails of social media’s deleterious effects on mental health.

But this didn’t at all mean mental health issues did not exist for Generation X. It could well be “that mental health issues then were suppressed, misunderstood, and often left untreated. To equate silence with strength is historically inaccurate and medically indefensible,” as one critical commenter wryly noted.

Nonetheless, Padilla shouldn’t be taken as atypical of the “Voltes V” generation.

As a generational cohort, Generation Xers grew up during the authoritarian Martial Law era, an era that forced those challenging the status quo to hide their psychological incapacities.

Gen X, however, later got “lucky because they came of age at the time democracy was restored” in 1986.

But before that lucky break, Generation Xers nurturing themselves to challenge the status quo would have caused them significant psychological distress, including feelings of worthlessness and isolation, which led to, or worsened, symptoms of depression.

In another way, too, Padilla cannot speak for Gen X since he grew up within the confines of a privileged political family, which probably shielded him from the silent shocks of an unspoken chaotic environment with no clear democratic rules that made the individual feel isolated and powerless, all of which are major contributors to mental health issues.