eunuch2001 (imported) wrote: Sat Jun 30, 2012 6:58 pm
Thousands of Chinese men became eunuchs for hundreds of years until the Qing Dynasty ended in 1912. I often wonder how all those eunuchs coped with depression. Maybe they were able to offer each other support and encouragement. They certainly didn't have access to HRT or anti-depressants.
A couple of things are in play here. First you have to distinguish between being miserable and being depressed. If you lose a battle where most of your friends are slaughtered, your wives and children are raped and enslaved, and your manhood is brutally chopped off and you are sold into backbreaking labor, you will probably be miserable, but you would know exactly the source of that misery. You would not be depressed. Depression on the other hand, is an unpleasant byproduct of freedom. If the universe doesn't sufficiently oppress me then I do it to myself. A large percentage of Chinese eunuchs were the spoils of war, and misery would overwhelm depression.
And of the voluntary eunuchs, you have to look at the system. For large chunks of Chinese history the vast Chinese Civil Service was mostly staffed by eunuchs who could rise through the ranks to positions of great power. Often the Emperor frolliced with his concubines within the Forbidden City leaving the country to be ruled by the eunuchs. (to the point that the evil eunuch was a stock villain in Chinese folklore.). In a Confucian society where family was everything, often after a couple of sons to inherit and run family enterprises, one of the younger sons would be castrated and schooled for government service with the expectation of return on investment in the form of government goodies channeled family-ward. ( a similar system occured in Italy with the great families and the papacy. Which is how so many of the younger sons of the Borgias and Medicis ended up pope) So the eunuch, while mocked (often with the adjective "smelly," alluding to the difficulty nullified eunuchs can have controlling the bladder) had a respected place in a society that revered familial devotion..
Still I suspect they were depressed.
Transward
