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PROZAC FOR THE POCKETBOOK
COPING WITH GLOBAL DEPRESSION

By SADDY McFORLORN

My name is Saddy McForlorn, and I have suffered from Global Depression, or GD, my entire life. Global Depression is a real condition, often resulting from unchecked episodes of Market Despair or Economic Panic Attacks. This illness can affect as many as 7 billion people—that’s a lot of people!
Given the current financial meltdown and the increased potential for a GD epidemic, it is important to become familiar with how this condition affects the ones we love, and to learn how to live with it. But how do you know if it really is GD, or just recession blues?

Does your entire planet:

• Lie in bed all day, not wanting to get up or invest?
• Conspicuously read Camus in front of you, despite repeated allegations that nothing matters?
• Have too little appetite to even fight children for scraps in the streets?
• Cut itself just because My Chemical Romance was cool at the time?

If you said “yes” to any of these things, then you may be dealing with a case of GD.
But there is hope; new treatments and understanding are making the battle easier. This isn’t your grandparents’ GD. As little as 75 years ago, a case of GD meant someone was going to have to don the super-villain archetype, kill millions of Jews, and instigate an epic battle between good and evil, thus dragging the whole of American industriousness into an unstoppable war machine that happened to be victorious and thereby wildly lucrative. Not anymore!
Today, possible methods of treatment include:

Cable TV – A steady intake of puppy-themed Animal Planet programming boosts unguarded happiness levels in your brain, and celebrity-based entertainment is a completely acceptable means for projecting your insecurities onto others. Unfortunately, Cable TV is a short-term treatment option. Given the nature of GD episodes, the screen will inevitably go blank, reciprocating your gaze with a menacing black stare, instilling in you an unprecedented horror that…well, you’ll have to kill them all.

Free Drugs – Feeling down? Take a slug of hose water. Feeling up? Take a slug of hose water. A recent report by the Associated Press found that the drinking water of at least 24 American metropolitan areas is contaminated with trace amounts of common pharmaceuticals. Keep drinking from the tap, and sooner or later you’ll get just what you need. This has a double positive effect in that it alleviates the incredible, crippling shame associated with getting caught drinking from your neighbor’s hose.

Irresponsible Hyperconsumption – For decades, you have thrived in a culture that consumes products and services with no conception of what it took to procure them. You’ve completely replaced your social contracts with slobbish entitlement. If you slow down, the sidewalk cracks, and GD’s rhizomes branch up at you. So keep consuming. You can’t stop now. Even if you run out of money, just get easy credit and buy a new house or something to keep the sidewalk together a little longer. This is a time-tested treatment option that has absolutely no fatalistic components.

Suicide – Suicide is like a friend, only it’s always there for you. Plus, you’ll produce valuable scraps for neighborhood kids.

By combining the latest treatment methods and knowledge about how this disorder works, we are now better equipped to deal with GD than ever before. Often the best remedy, however, is prevention. It’s like that old saying: “Kill a bird. With a stone nonetheless.”

You can do the following to help prevent a GD epidemic:

Nothing. Wait…you’re a person, right? Yeah, nothing.