I really do want my brother to recover and stuff but boy howdy is that hard sometimes

Idk if anyone remembers all my posts about him, buuuuut he's super depressed. He tried to kill himself for a few days last winter and yeah, that was pretty rough. He takes a big interest in politics, which I appreciate, but he seems like, obsessively fixated on the bad elements. Mention the catholic church? Steers the conversation straight towards the child sex scandal. Mention the ATF? Don't you know they once did psychological warfare against crazed religious fundamentalists in a standoff? Mention the cops under any circumstances and there's no conversation outside of racism.

On a surface level, it maybe feels like a result of being a radical, which is based. You should be a radical. But it makes him exhausting to talk about and it gives you the feeling that he doesn't actually want to see anything improve; he just wants to be the smarmiest guy on the Titanic as it sinks, you know?

And it's symptomatic of thought patterns he always has too; like, all through childhood he'd constantly be ripping into me over absolutely everything. Even now, he goes straight for mockery if I ever tell him anything, which really makes me wanna just stonewall him all of the time. He does this with everyone, he defends it as like an art of being cool and edgy if confronted (obv not word for word, just the vibe), and I can only presume that he does it to himself. Illness obviously isn't a meritocracy, and that includes mental illness. But when you've turned negativity into a perverse ideology, I struggle not to feel like you deserve what you get at least a little bit. And moreover, it makes me feel like I can't help you without putting myself at risk. If that's the choice I'm making, I'd honestly rather cut the line.