2024: the year the whole planet needed vagus nerve stimulation

I'm finding it a bit hard to think of a worse year over the last several decades, in a "reasons to feel optimistic about the direction the planet is heading in," sense.   I guess people may have felt this way in (say) the mid 70's - a far from happy decade - but I was still somewhat of a techno-optimist at that stage and had a teenage life to live. 

But gee, I mean - now we have the whole Middle East a complete humanitarian disaster again; much of Africa in terrible governance and humanitarian crisis, again; the danger to the West and Western interests from Russia and China, again; the unbelievable election of Trump, again; the loonies he wants to put in control and the drug addled, power hungry billionaire who helped put him in place (well, I guess this not a case of again - it's like a bad gothic Batman story come to life for the first time.)   Another Christmas market terror incident in Europe just puts the cherry on top.

Also - overlaying all of this (which was not the case in the 70's) is the global climate disruption that Right wing (mostly ageing) idiots still refuse to acknowledge, and which we can only deal with by waiting for them to die.

Anyway, I'm talking about the vagus nerve because of this interesting story at CNN:

Vagus nerve stimulation may relieve treatment-resistant depression, study finds   

And this story that it opens with - about  how depression struck someone - surprised me (due to its sudden onset:

Nick Fournie was 24 years old when severe depression upended his life.

Fournie had been married to his longtime sweetheart for two years, and had no reason to suspect he had any mental health issues.

“I just thought to myself, ‘If this is it, if this is all there is to life — if it ended now, I’d be OK with it,’” Nick, now 62 and based in Illinois, said of that fateful day outdoors nearly 40 years ago. 

But one day as he was mowing the lawn, his perspective on life abruptly flipped from light to dark. The shift would set him and his wife, Mary, on a tumultuous, yearslong journey of fighting for his well-being and another chance at a happy life together — until they learned of an alternative, obscure treatment that would change everything.

I wonder how often that happens - I am much more used to the idea that it develops somewhat gradually, or perhaps as a result of a sudden crisis such as a nervous breakdown.