The Human Brain is a Corporation
A personal reflection on depression, contradiction, and what it means to be seen.
1. The Corporate Self
The human brain is a corporation.
We like to think of the Self as something nuclear — compact, singular, terribly powerful. A core identity, a stable reactor. But in truth, the self is more like a corporation: layered, inconsistent, sprawling, bureaucratic, often contradictory. We conceal within us departments with different agendas and (often outdated) policies running in the background.
And this precious, fragile self is not powered by a single source of energy — just a messy boardroom of inner voices vying for control. Some outdated, some overworked, and some just trying to keep the lights on.
Depression is not a failure of the core. It’s a labour strike. A systems outage. A cry from the invisible workforce within — one that is so unique in each of us, and yet collectively recognisable, scattered with familiar distortions, patterns, and signals.
Some of us turn a blind eye to our own signs. Others shut down operations. A few manage to ask for help.
2. Falling Through the Cracks
About eight years ago, I started treatment for depression. I went to the doctor about a knee problem, having just quit smoking — and to this day, I still don’t know how dishevelled I must have looked to walk out with that prescription. I’m grateful for that doctor who saw right through me, because I was so high-functioning I don’t think I’d ever have asked for help if someone hadn’t calmly told me I needed it.
Left to my own devices, I would have kept going: efficient, articulate, depleted. My condition didn’t announce itself. It leaked, slowly, into everything. A quiet erosion, punctuated by dramatic episodes that even I couldn’t explain.
And still — just a few years before my own diagnosis — I was the one not recognising its existence in someone I loved. A dear, beloved friend who needed help. I was the one urging him not to go on medication. The one who missed the signs, the symptoms, the quiet cries for help — all unfolding right beside me, inside my own flawed, deep love.
3. Boundaries, Blind Spots, and the Invisibility of Suffering
In dismissing the lived experiences of the people around us, our own lives may become safer — but they also become poorer, lonelier. Then comes the unmistakably difficult task of setting boundaries between the self and the other, and learning how those two actually interact. Most of the time, these boundaries are brittle — imaginary buffer zones attempting to contain the uncontainable: our human nature.
The most devastating thing about mental health is that there is hope — but no answers. We often use the “broken arm” metaphor to highlight how society treats physical and mental illness differently. If you had a broken arm, no one would tell you to snap out of it, say it’s all in your head, or question whether you’re really in pain.
The comparison draws attention to the absurdity — but it doesn’t capture the journey. Some carry the burden silently. Others are misdiagnosed, dismissed, or stigmatised. And some do get better. But there is no X-ray held to the light revealing what’s fractured. No cast for the human psyche. There’s only time, language — limited as it is in communicating our corporate brains — and a willingness to listen to the nonsensical.
4. Beyond Reason
And that is the crux of the matter. Our efforts are rational and scientific — this is the weaponry we possess against the invisible and unfathomable. Research is vital, mapping the source(s) matters, but there is never enough data to fully explain what happened, or why one person responds to life differently than another. Mental health — and mental illness — exist in a realm beyond reason. And perhaps in accepting that, we begin to heal.
This is where philosophy, not science, has often offered a clearer mirror. Nietzsche, ever the unsettling observer of the human condition, wrote that “the illogical is necessary for humanity” — not as a flaw, but as an engine of survival. Camus took it further: if life is absurd, then our task is not to resolve the absurdity, but to live within it. To push the boulder up the hill, knowing it will fall again — and still imagine Sisyphus happy.
In this light, healing isn’t a return to logic. It’s the gradual ability to sit with contradiction. To make peace with the idea that no one will ever hand you a clear diagnosis of the soul.
5. The Dismantling
Getting better is a journey of dismantling oneself.
Not a redemption arc, but a reckoning. You lose the scaffolding, the certainty, the self that could power through, make sense of things, stay coherent. Then comes the absence of who you thought you were — and the unbearable quiet that follows.
At the edge of that void, a restructured self begins to emerge — still flawed and fragmented, but more honest, less reactive, more able to sit with contradiction and remain intact. Healing isn’t triumph. It’s remembering how to hold your own weight without disappearing.
6. The Reframed Self: Sisyphus
We know Sisyphus for his punishment — the endless labour, the stone that never stays. But that’s not all he was: he was also a king, a cunning strategist, a man who challenged the gods. His identity wasn’t erased by his suffering; it was simply reframed by it. Depression, too, is a condition — not a definition. In it, we need to be loved whole not pathologised. It is a weight we carry, not the totality of who we are, in all our fractured, human facets.
But love is imperfect, and not everyone will be able to meet us halfway — and maybe they shouldn’t have to. There’s grace in recognising that, too, and in learning to forgive.
7. The Workplace Within and Without
Brains and corporations both try to be rational systems, but they’re built on human fallibility. Our corporations are just as flawed as our wired little brains — prone to distortions, snap judgements, and runaway narratives. Gossip functions like an internal voice gone rogue: speculative, selective, often cruel. And yet it thrives in the quiet spaces where real conversations should be.
We spend so much of our lives inside these systems that the way we speak about each other — and whether we choose to truly see or erase one another — matters more than we realise or admit.
8. Awareness Is Not a Week
In writing this, I know the people who most need to see it are the ones who won’t click to read. That’s the quiet tragedy of mental health: it remains unseen, unread, unanswered — until it isn’t. Until someone burns out, breaks down, or vanishes beneath the surface of their own silence.
And this, too, is why awareness must be more than a campaign. Mental health isn’t a theme for a week or a month — it’s a lived experience. Ongoing, messy, deeply human. It asks not just for attention, but for care. Not just for language, but for listening.
And above all, it asks us — in our boardrooms, our break rooms, our families and our friendships — to remember what we are: not machines, not functions, but people. Carrying more than we know or care to show.
